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Getting started

What Smart Reels needs, where it lives in the admin, and the order the work has to happen in.

Smart Reels puts shoppable video on your store. You upload vertical clips, attach each one to a product, and group them into a layout that appears on your product pages or anywhere you place a shortcode. Tapping a video opens it full screen with the product beside it, price, variations and add to cart included.

The videos are yours. They live in your own WordPress media library and are served from your own site, so there is no external service, no API key and no account to connect.

Requirements

  • WordPress 5.6 or newer
  • WooCommerce 5.0 or newer, installed and active
  • PHP 7.4 or newer

WooCommerce is a hard dependency. WordPress will not activate Smart Reels without it, and it will not let you deactivate WooCommerce while Smart Reels is running.

Install and activate

  1. In WordPress, go to Plugins then Add New then Upload Plugin, and choose the zip file. The free edition can instead be installed by searching the plugin directory.
  2. Activate it.
  3. Open WooCommerce then Smart Reels.

The two tabs

Everything happens on one screen, under WooCommerce then Smart Reels, which has two tabs.

Reels
Every video you have added, with a thumbnail, the product it is attached to, where the video came from and when it was added.
Layouts
The galleries you have built from those reels, with the type, how many reels each holds, where it is displayed and its shortcode.
The Smart Reels admin screen on the Reels tab, listing eleven reels with thumbnail, title, attached product, source and date columns
The Reels tab. The Product column is the one to check: a reel with no product attached has nothing to show beside the video in the player.

The order of work

It is always the same, and doing it out of order is the usual reason nothing appears on the shop.

  1. Add your reels and attach each one to a product.
  2. Build a layout from those reels and pick its type.
  3. Tell the layout where to appear, on all products, on products you choose, or by shortcode only.
  4. Publish the layout. A draft layout shows nothing and its shortcode renders as plain text.

Who can do this

Creating and publishing reels and layouts needs the edit_products capability, which means administrators and shop managers. Authors and contributors cannot create or publish them.

Free and Pro

EditionWhat you get
BothReels, playlist layouts in grid view, the Modern card design, the full screen player with variations and add to cart, and display on all or selected products
Pro onlyCarousel view, the Classic, Overlay and Title Only designs, autoplay on hover, shortcode placement, Stories, Reel Pops and analytics

In the free edition the Pro settings are shown as locked placeholders rather than hidden, so you can see what a layout would gain, and Stories and Reel Pops appear in the type picker as locked cards. Each article below says which edition its feature belongs to.

NextAdding a reel