If you are building any e-commerce on WordPress, WooCommerce is an incredibly easy tool to use and starts out at the right price point: free! But, like all free and/or open source software, WooCommerce can have some built in functionality that is not easy to get around.
One area that WooCommerce is difficult to work with is the fact that it is designed for selling physical products. If I am going to buy a physical product, I want to be able to zoom in on specific parts of the product photos. This functionality comes out of the box on WooCommerce but it can be difficult to turn off.
If you want to learn the programming calls to turn off the zoom function you can read NJengah’s tutorial on removing Zoom from WooCommerce. However, there is an easier way.
Don’t Re-Invent The Wheel
I have lost many hours trying to do something “the right way,” but in website design there is no right way. Your work can increase momentum or increase entropy but can never be perfect or done. As attributed to Voltaire who quoted someone else, perfect is the enemy of the good.
I discovered a simple solution for creating product images for non physical products that works really well and doesn’t require recoding the theme, creating child themes, or more.
Don’t use WooCommerce images.
You can use a normal WordPress image and add product descriptions and purchase buttons on unique pages. If you want the image to link to your product, you can do that as well. In other words, creating your own product page with WooCommerce is so easy that you can avoid the defaults altogether.
Check out Aletheia Christian College’s website to see how the images I used are being put to work.