A question we get a lot from clients who run their own WooCommerce stores: “I opened my product to change the price, but there’s no price field. What happened?”
The short answer is that your product is set as a variable product — a single product that has multiple options (sizes, colours, materials, capacities, etc.) and each option can have its own price, stock count, image, and SKU. Because each option is priced separately, WooCommerce hides the single “Regular price” field you see on simpler products.
Once you know where to look, editing the price of each option takes a few seconds. Here’s how it all fits together.
Simple vs variable products — what’s the difference?
WooCommerce groups products into a few types. The two you’ll see most often are:
- Simple product — one product, one price. A book, a single-flavour jar of jam, a one-size scarf. You see a “Regular price” and a “Sale price” field at the top of the Product data section, and that’s it.
- Variable product — one product, multiple variations. A T-shirt that comes in S/M/L/XL and three colours. A cake that comes in 1 kg / 2 kg / 3 kg. A subscription with monthly / yearly options.
A variable product is essentially one parent product holding several child variations under it. The parent stores the title, description, category, and tags. Each variation stores its own price, stock, image, weight, SKU, and dimensions.
That’s why the top of the edit-product page on a variable product doesn’t have a single price field — the price isn’t a property of the parent, it’s a property of each variation.
Step 1 — confirm your product is a “variable product”
Open the product in WordPress (Products → All Products → click your product). Scroll down to the Product data box. At the top of that box, there’s a dropdown — make sure it says Variable product.
If the dropdown says “Simple product”, that’s why you’re seeing the regular price field — and you can edit it right there. If it says “Variable product”, continue to the next step.
Step 2 — find the Variations tab
Inside the Product data box (left column), you’ll see tabs like:
- General
- Inventory
- Shipping
- Linked Products
- Attributes
- Variations
- Advanced
Click Variations. This is where every option of your product lives — Small / Medium / Large, Red / Blue / Black, 250g / 500g / 1kg, etc.
Note: If the Variations tab is empty or missing, it means the product hasn’t been given any attributes yet (e.g. “Size” or “Colour”). You’d set those up in the Attributes tab first, tick “Used for variations”, save, and then come back to Variations.
Step 3 — expand a variation and edit its price
Each variation appears as a collapsed row. Click the small arrow on the right of the row to expand it. Inside, you’ll find:
- Regular price — the everyday price for this specific variation
- Sale price — optional discounted price
- SKU — your internal stock code for this variation
- Stock — how many of this variation you have left (if stock management is on)
- Weight, dimensions, shipping class — for accurate shipping
- Variation image — a different photo just for this variation
- Description — extra info specific to this variation
Change the Regular price to whatever you want and click the Update button at the top right of the page. That’s it — the new price will be live within a minute.
Step 4 — repeat for each variation (or bulk-edit)
You can expand each variation one by one, or use the Bulk actions dropdown at the top of the Variations tab to update the same field across all variations at once. Common bulk actions:
- Set regular prices — applies one price to every variation
- Increase regular prices — bump every price by a fixed amount or percentage
- Decrease regular prices — useful for site-wide sales
- Set stock — quickly stock up all variations at once
- Toggle “In stock” — mark every variation as in or out of stock
After choosing a bulk action, click Apply, enter the value when prompted, and remember to click Update at the top right of the page when you’re done.
Common gotchas
The customer says the product price is wrong — make sure you clicked the blue Update button at the top right after editing variations. WooCommerce won’t save automatically.
One variation isn’t showing on the storefront — open that variation and check that it has a Regular price set. Variations without a price are hidden from shoppers.
The product page shows “From £X” — that’s WooCommerce displaying the lowest-priced variation. It’s normal behaviour for variable products and helps shoppers see your starting price.
The product image doesn’t change when a variation is selected — that variation needs its own image uploaded in the variation’s “Variation image” field. The main product gallery doesn’t switch automatically.
You see the message “This variation cannot be added to the cart” — usually means the variation has no price set, or stock management is on with zero stock. Open the variation and check both.
Wrap-up
The single thing to remember: with variable products, the price lives inside each variation, not at the top of the page. Once you know that, the rest of the workflow falls into place — find the Variations tab, expand the variation you want to change, edit the Regular price, click Update.
If you’re not sure whether a product should be a simple or variable product, the rule of thumb is: if a customer ever needs to choose between options before adding it to their cart, it’s a variable product.
Still stuck? Send us a quick message and we’ll walk you through it on a screen-share — it usually takes 5 minutes to get comfortable with the layout, and once you’ve done it once for one product, every other product on your store works the same way.
