How to use WooCommerce as a catalog

March 9, 2016

If you have a lot of products you want to showcase on your website there are a few ways to go about it. You can create a Custom Post Type or Taxonomy. If there is a chance you might want to sell the products online in future using WooCommerce is a great option. You can use it as a catalogue with out the shopping cart.

Using WooCommerce as a catalogue makes sense. It already has variations, attributes, tags and categories all built in. A great help todisplay and organise your products. Then if you want to turn your site into a store you can reverse the changes.

On a standard WooCommerce install if you don’t assign a price to a product then it will still be available to put it in the cart. But the product will be ‘free’.

To make WooCommerce act like a catalogue we will need to get rid of the free product pricing and the Add to Cart button.

First we’ll get rid of the free notice on products with on price. If you paste the code below into your theme’s functions.php file it will do the job. It modifies a WooCommerce function to return nothing rather than the ‘free’ label when a product has no price.

// Hides the 'Free!' price notice
 function hide_free_price_notice( $price ) {
 return '';
 }

Next we need to disable the Add to Cart button so the products can’t be added to the cart. This code removes the add to cart action.

// remove "Add to Cart" button on product listing page in WooCommerce
 add_action( 'woocommerce_after_shop_loop_item', 'remove_add_to_cart_buttons', 1 );
 function remove_add_to_cart_buttons() {
 remove_action( 'woocommerce_after_shop_loop_item', 'woocommerce_template_loop_add_to_cart' );
 }

NB. if a product has a price it will still be available to buy. To make any product a catalogue only product just remove the price in the product admin page.