If any meaningful share of your orders are "a bunch of this in different sizes/colors" rather than "one item," you've probably already felt the friction of WooCommerce's default variation dropdown. There are a few real ways stores handle this.
The default. Free, requires nothing, and is genuinely fine for stores where bulk orders are rare. It becomes a real cost the moment a meaningful share of your customers are buying spreads rather than single items — every variation is its own trip through the add-to-cart flow.
Some larger stores commission a fully custom bulk-ordering interface — tiered pricing, minimum order quantities, separate wholesale login, the works. This is the right call if your wholesale logic is genuinely unique (different pricing tiers per customer, approval workflows, net-30 terms). It's also slow and expensive to build and maintain, and it's overkill if what you actually need is just "let people order multiple variations in one action."
For the common case — customers just need to set quantities across several variations in one screen — a purpose-built plugin gets you there without a custom build. Simple Variation Quantities puts every variation in a grid or list, each with its own quantity field, and adds everything to cart in one Ajax action. It's 100% compatible with existing themes and plugins, so it drops into a store you already have rather than requiring a rebuild.
Start with the plugin unless you already know you need genuinely custom wholesale logic (tiered pricing per account, approval flows) — most stores that think they need a custom portal actually just need the ordering friction removed, which is a much smaller problem to solve.
See the Variation Quantities plugin page for pricing and details.
