How to add gift wrapping to WooCommerce products in three easy steps

You’d like the option to add gift wrapping to your WooCommerce products. In this article, we’ll look at three easy steps to give your customers the option of having their products gift wrapped, including how to offer a gift message.

WooCommerce gift wrapping

In this article, we’ll look at adding a simple checkbox option for adding gift wrapping, how to charge for gift wrapping, plus some more advanced options like letting the customer choose the gift wrapping paper and write a custom message.

We’ll also look at including an option to send the gift direct to its recipient by offering the ability to add another address. You can view the demo product here.

We’ll discuss some of the benefits of offering a gift wrapping service and examine whether it’s better to add the gift wrapping option to your products or at checkout.

Finally we’ll look at some creative ideas for your gift wrapping service.

If you’re here because you’ve already decided that you want a gift wrapping option and you just want to find out how to accomplish it, then you can skip direct to the section on how to add gift wrapping to WooCommerce products.

But if you’d like to know whether gift wrapping is right for your store, and learn some facts and figures, then read on.

What are the advantages of offering a gift wrapping option

Giving your customers a gift wrapping option is essential for many types of WooCommerce store – whether you’re selling books, jewellery, watches, in fact any product that might be given as a gift.

Your customers will love you for it

Your customers will thank you for offering a gift wrapping option – mainly because it’ll save them time. According to this survey, over half of us dislike wrapping gifts because it takes too much time.

(Perhaps the most surprising thing about this research is that someone actually commissioned a survey into why people don’t like wrapping gifts).

In any case, offering a service like this will boost your customer happiness and therefore improve customer retention. It’ll also help give you an edge over your competitors who might not offer the service.

Make you more money

Essentially, though, gift wrapping is another way you can add value to your product and make more money.

According to this guy, gift wrapping can have profit margin of up to 93%.

It’s a simple way to increase your AOV: your Average Order Value.

Adding a WooCommerce gift wrapping option to your products

Okay, let’s look at exactly how to add a gift wrapping option in WooCommerce. Firstly, let’s address the question of whether to add the option to products or at checkout.

Add a gift option to the checkout

Should you add your gift wrapping option to the checkout? The short answer is no.

It’s fine if your customers are only going to be buying one product at a time. But if they have multiple products in the cart, having the gift wrap option at checkout doesn’t allow them to choose which products to have wrapped.

The advantages of adding the gift wrapping option to products

Adding the gift wrapping option to products allows your customers to choose which products to have wrapped. If it’s a single option at the checkout, there’s no way for them to differentiate.

You can also create different gift wrapping options for different product categories, meaning you can choose to charge more for certain items. For example, you might want to charge more for bigger items.

Using the method below, you only need to set up the gift wrapping option once – then you can choose to add it to all products or just a select few.

It also gives you the ability to turn it off on – maybe you only want to offer gift wrapping at certain times of the year.

How to add a gift wrapping option to WooCommerce products

Okay, let’s look at the three easy steps to add WooCommerce gift wrapping. We’re going to be using the WooCommerce Products Add-Ons Ultimate plugin, which allows you to add extra fields to WooCommerce products.

Step One: create a global group

Once you’ve downloaded and installed Add-Ons Ultimate, you can start to create your gift wrapping fields. Unless you want to add the option to one specific product only, I suggest adding it as a global add-on.

This means that you can include the gift wrapping option on all products, on multiple selected products, or on products in specified categories.

Go to Product Add-Ons > Global Groups and click ‘Add Group’. In the ‘Group Meta’ section, you can enter a title and description for the group if you wish, and select which products to display the options on. We’ll add to all products.

Step two: create a checkbox field

So far so good. Now it’s time to add our first field. Click ‘Add Field’ and ensure the ‘Field Type’ is set to ‘Checkbox’.

Note that I’ve added an instruction to the customer in the ‘Field Label’ setting. I’ve also set a price of 3.95. This means that if the customer selects this option, 3.95 will get added to the product price.

We’ve also added an image of a gift wrapped parcel, just to show the customer how nicely wrapped their gift will be.

This is how the field will look on the front end. Note that I’m using the Storefront theme so your theme might look slightly different. But all the styles are customisable anyhow.

Now, if that’s as far as you want to go, then this will work perfectly for you. If the user selects the checkbox and clicks ‘Add to cart’, the extra option and price will get added too.

The option will also get passed to the order once the user has checked out – so you’ll see it clearly on your new order emails and in the order screen in the WooCommerce dashboard.

Now let’s look at adding some more advanced options.

Step three: adding advanced options

We’re going to add several more fields:

• An image swatch field for users to select their preferred style of wrapping paper (note that you’ll need the Pro version of Add-Ons Ultimate for this field type)
• A textarea field for a custom WooCommerce gift message

These fields will only display if the user has selected the option to add gift wrapping.

Choosing your wrapping paper

It might be a nice option to let the customer choose which wrapping paper to use. Using the Image Swatch field means that we can let them see an image of the paper.

Here’s the image swatch field settings:

Note a couple of extra details: we need to ensure that the user completes this field so the ‘Required Field’ setting is enabled.

Secondly, we only want this field to be displayed if the option to add gift wrapping has been selected. So we’ve added a condition.

Adding a WooCommerce gift message to the recipient

If you like, you might want to offer the chance to include a custom gift message from the customer to the gift recipient. For this, we’ve added a textarea field:

This is also a required field with a condition. Note also that I’ve specified a maximum number of characters. This is to ensure that any message will fit on the card.

If you wanted to get really fancy, you could even charge per character for this field.

This is how the product will look with these two extra fields.

When the customer clicks the ‘Add gift wrapping’ option, the image swatch and gift message fields appear.

Bonus step: add separate delivery address

As a special extra bonus, let’s look at adding an option to send the gift directly to the recipient, rather than to the customer. It’ll look like this on the front end:

You can see that we added another checkbox with the label ‘Send to another address?’. When this is checked, further address fields are displayed.

Here are the settings for the address checkbox:

Note that I’ve added some additional description, just to explain what the option is.

Then we add three further text and textarea fields for the address. Here are the settings for the name field:

Note that the condition is slightly different: this field will only display if the ‘Send to another address?’ option is checked.

Creative ideas for gift wrapping

While researching this article, I came across a couple of creative ideas for making your gift wrapping and whole customer experience extra special.

One idea was for including handwritten notes with gift wrapped products. This brings a really personal touch and will certainly make your products stand out from the crowd.

The second idea was for including bonus items, like sweets, candy or charms, in the packaging. Everyone loves feeling like they’ve got something for free.

Finally, I found a collection of creative gift wrapping ideas here, each with a tutorial on how to achieve the wrapping style.

Further ideas for gift products

If you’re looking at gift wrapping, then you might be interested in this article on how to offer a free gift in WooCommerce.

Or you might also want to take a look at this article on creating WooCommerce product bundles – an ideal gift idea to offer on your site..

WooCommerce gift wrapping plugin

Hopefully that has been useful. Remember, to include a gift wrapping option and/or gift message in your WooCommerce products, you just need the Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin.