This means you’ll need to add each track as a separate product, which can lead to a very cluttered catalog page. Fortunately, if you’re using our Cue Pro plugin, there is a workaround that will allow you to sell individual tracks and the full-length record on the same product page.
How to Sell Full Length Records and Individual Tracks on WooCommerce
As you know, Cue Pro allows you to add purchase links to each track on a playlist. Using this functionality along with the native catalog visibility option in WooCommerce, we can embed a playlist in an album’s product description, while hiding the additional single track products. It sounds more complicated than it is. Below, you’ll find step by step instructions:
We’ll use our Merchato theme in this demonstration, since it comes with full WooCommerce integration and will look great, right out of the box.
Step 1: Add the full-length downloadable album as a product in WooCommerce
Add your full-length record just like any other downloadable product.
Step 2: Add all individual tracks as WooCommerce products, changing the catalog visibility to “Search Results Only”
Add your tracks as WooCommerce products just like you did for you the full-length album.
In the “Publish” panel of the edit product screen for each track, you’ll see an option to change catalog visibility. Since we don’t want each individual track to appear on the main shop page, we’ll change this to “Search results only.” This will hide the track but still allow users to search for it.
Now, on our demo site, you can see that the individual tracks are no longer visible on the products page.
Step 3: Create a playlist for the full album in CuePro
You can add your audio preview files as the mp3s for each of the album’s songs just like you would for any Cue playlist.
Step 4: Add “Add to Cart” links for each individual track in your playlist.
Did you know you can create an “Add to Cart” link for any item in WooCommerce? All you need is the item ID, which you can get from hovering over a product name in the “All Products” screen of WooCommerce.
The 943 in the above example is the product ID for Track one. This is the number you’ll need to create your “Add to Cart” link.
The standard format for an “Add to Cart” link is:
https://example.com/?add-to-cart=productID
So using the example above, the following link should be used:
https://example.com/?add-to-cart=943
This link is what needs to be added to the Purchase URL for that specific track.
You can repeat this process for all of the tracks on the album.
Step 5: Embed your CuePro playlist in the full album product description field.
Grab your Cue Playlist shortcode and add it to the product description for the your full-length album.
You now have a single product page where customers can purchase the whole album, or individual tracks!
Redirect to the Shopping Cart
By default, WooCommerce will reload the page your user is on when they add an item to cart. This works well when someone tries to purchase the actual product displayed on the page. In this case, the Full Length Record. However, when a user clicks the buy button for each individual track, it will force the site to reload the home page. This may be confusing for your users.
To prevent this, you can enable the option to redirect the user to the shopping cart page after they’ve added an item to their cart. You can find these settings under: WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Display → Add to cart behavior.
This will redirect the user to their shopping cart page.
That’s it! You can repeat this process for every album you’d like to sell.
Ideally WooCommerce will release a native feature that will accomplish listing full albums and individual tracks together. In the meantime though, this solution should allow you to keep your site’s storefront organized, while still giving your customers the option to purchase what they’d like.
Thanks for the detailed post …. However, I’m a little unclear as to the ability to preview only a short (say, 30 seconds or so) clip of a track prior to purchase – is this easily accomplished? Thanks
When someone buys the full album, in the above example, do they get individual tracks or one long track of the whole album? I’d prefer to be able to allow them to buy the full album and get a download of multiple files (without using .zip compression). Is this possible? Thanks!