Variable products are one of the most common product types in WooCommerce — products that come in multiple variants like size, colour, or material. Adding a Buy Now button to a variable product requires handling the variation selection before sending the customer to checkout. Here’s how the TheForge Buy Now Button plugin handles it.
The Challenge with Variable Products
A simple product has one SKU, one price, one stock status. Click Buy Now → add to cart → go to checkout. Straightforward.
A variable product — a t-shirt in five colours and four sizes, for example — has up to 20 variations. The Buy Now button can’t send the customer to checkout until they’ve chosen which variation they want. If you skip that step, the wrong variation ends up in the cart (or no variation at all).
How the Plugin Handles It
The Buy Now Button plugin integrates with WooCommerce’s native variation attribute selectors. The Buy Now button is inactive (greyed out) until the customer has selected all required attributes. Once a complete variation is selected — a specific size AND colour, for example — the button activates.
Click the active button, and the plugin adds exactly that variation to the cart and redirects to checkout. The customer sees their chosen variation pre-selected on the checkout page.
Swatch Compatibility
Many WooCommerce themes and plugins replace the default dropdown attribute selectors with visual swatches. The Buy Now Button plugin is compatible with the major swatch plugins, detecting variation selection events regardless of whether the selector is a dropdown, button swatch, colour swatch, or image swatch.
Out of Stock Variations
If the selected variation is out of stock, the Buy Now button shows as unavailable — the same way the standard Add to Cart button behaves. The customer can select a different in-stock variation to re-enable it.
Displaying the Button Position on Variable Products
On variable products, position matters. The button needs to appear after the attribute selectors so customers can clearly see the flow: choose your options → click Buy Now. You can configure the button position in the plugin settings — below the variation selector is usually the most natural placement.
Variable Products in Grouped Products
Grouped products — sets of related products purchased together — have a different structure. The Buy Now Button plugin handles grouped products by adding all selected quantities of each product in the group to the cart simultaneously before redirecting to checkout.
For questions about variable product setup, visit the ThePluginForge support page.