WooCommerce discounts – how to create quantity-based pricing rules

WooCommerce discounts

As an online store owner, there are many reasons why you might want to offer WooCommerce discounts. You could offer WooCommerce quantity discounts as part of your marketing, end of season sale, or simply to boost revenue.

What’s more, WooCommerce quantity-based pricing is straightforward to set up. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how you can use quantity-based discount pricing to make more money nad net more conversions.

You’ll learn:

First though, let’s put everything into context before we talk about quantity discounts.

What quantity discounts are in WooCommerce

A quantity discount is an incentive you offer customers that costs them less on the product price per unit if they purchase in larger quantities. For example:

  • 1 unit costs $5.99 9 (i.e. per unit cost is $5.99)
  • 10 units cost $49.99 (i.e. per unit cost is $4.99)
  • 50 units cost $199.99 (i.e. per unit cost is $3.99)

You’ll come across this a lot as a consumer and store owner, as it provides a number of fantastic benefits. Let’s talk more about this next.

Benefits of WooCommerce quantity discounts

Offering customers WooCommerce quantity discounts means you’re able to sell more products. What’s more, buyers can purchase them at a cheaper rate. It’s a win-win!

It’s also a great way to increase your average order value while reducing shipping and handling costs. This is because you can ship larger quantities of products to fewer places with quantity discounts. In contrast, without it, you’ll need to ship smaller quantities to lots of different places.

Offering these sorts of WooCommerce discounts is great for ‘everything must go’ sales, clearance sales, or end of season sales. Any time you need to offload stock is an ideal opportunity to employ a WooCommerce quantity discount.

By now, you’ll know what WooCommerce quantity discounts are and how they can benefit your business. Next, we’ll look at the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin. This lets you set up WooCommerce quantity-based pricing in a few simple steps.

Key features on offer with the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin

Of course, the WooCommerce plugin is a robust solution for all e-commerce WordPress websites. However, it does lack some essential features when it comes to offering discounts. As such, if you want to set up WooCommerce quantity-based pricing, the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin can work wonders.

WooCommerce Fees and Discounts is a flexible WooCommerce discounts plugin that lets you leverage bulk pricing discounts and create your own dynamic discount rules.

WooCommerce Fees and Discounts featured image

WooCommerce Fees and Discounts

Create powerful pricing incentives quickly and easily

Find Out More

Key Features

There are a number of features worth noting:

  • Bulk discounts. You can apply discounts at checkout for specific products, based on the quantity a customer adds to their cart. You can apply bulk discounts to individual products, or to everything within a particular product category.
  • Dynamic pricing rules. You can create WooCommerce dynamic pricing rules that let you create unique quantity-based pricing. For example, you can apply a Buy One Get One Free offer or a Buy two of Product A and get Product B at X percent off offer.
  • User-role based pricing. You can use the plugin to offer quantity discounts to specific types of customers based on a specified user role. This is useful if you sell to wholesale customers, or offer wholesale pricing as part of a marketing campaign.

The WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin comes with built-in features to offer WooCommerce quantity discounts with fine-grained control over products. For example, you can set up discount rules for individual product pages, for specific categories, or all products. In addition, the plugin gives you tons of options for setting up and accepting payments.

3 different ways to use quantity-based WooCommerce discounts

Next, we’ll offer three different ways WooCommerce discounts can help to incentivize customers to purchase in larger quantities. We’ll also explain how offering WooCommerce quantity discounts will benefit your business in each scenario.

Before you begin, you’ll need to purchase the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin. We’ll assume you already have a WordPress website with WooCommerce set up, along with some WooCommerce products.

Use case #1: Offer a sale on seasonal products

If you sell seasonal products, you’ll need an effective way to clear out old inventory once demand drops. One way to incentivize customers to purchase larger quantities of goods from you is by offering WooCommerce quantity discounts.

Using the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin, you can offer discounts by product category. For example, if you organize WooCommerce products into categories such as Winter Stock or Summer Stock, you can offer discounts on every product within those categories. The approach also works for perishable goods such as dairy products or bakery items.

How to offer WooCommerce discounts by product category

Your first step is to create dynamic pricing discount rules. To start, head to WooCommerce > Settings > Fees and Discounts > Dynamic Pricing within WordPress.

Next, use the Pricing table option to decide where you want it to appear. For example, you can choose to have it appear before or after the Add to Cart button. By contrast, you can also hide it from the front end.

Next, we’ll create a new rule using a few steps:

  • First, use the drop-down menu to set ‘Offer type’ to ‘Bulk Pricing’.
  • Next, enter some text in the ‘Label’ field to display information about the discount.
  • From here, use the drop-down menu next to the ‘Applies to’ field and select products to apply the quantity-based discounts to. Following our example, we’ll apply the discount to all products in the Winter Stock.
  • Then, set the ‘“Buy” categories’ option and the ‘“Get” categories’ option to ‘Winter Stock’.
  • Finally, the ‘Tiers’ option lets you create WooCommerce discounts based on the number of products in the shopping cart.

At this point, you can fill out the Min quantity, Max quantity, Adjustment, Amount, and Label fields to set up as many dynamic pricing rules as you’d like. For example, take three pricing tiers:

  • 5 percent discount off of the product price when you purchase 10-49 units
  • 10 percent discount when you purchase 50-99 units
  • 15 percent discount when you purchase 100-149 units

You’ll enter this data into the relevant fields within the plugin:

WooCommerce Fees and Discounts settings for selling seasonal products

When customers add products from the Winter Stock category, they’ll get a discount based on how many they purchase.

Preview of shopping cart on the front-end

By offering WooCommerce quantity discounts on seasonal products, you can quickly clear old inventory while increasing sales. What’s more, your customers will get a great deal on out-of-season products.

Use case #2: Buy ‘X’ of category A and get ‘X’ percent off on category B

Another way to offer WooCommerce discounts is to offer an incentive to buy a number of products from one category in order to qualify for a discount on other items. For example, you might offer a deal where a customer gets a discount on a selected category based on a purchase from another.

This sort of WooCommerce quantity discount works great for clearance and end of season sales, along with related ‘upsells’. For example, if a customer chooses to buy a product from one line (such as a laptop or smartphone), they can then get a 30 percent discount on an accessory (such as a charger or cases).

By offering WooCommerce quantity discounts in this way, you can boost sales and increase your average order value. This is also a great way to upsell related products.

How to create ‘buy X get Y’ WooCommerce discounts

Buy one get one free example in WooCommerce

As before, first go to ‘WooCommerce > Settings > Fees and Discounts > Dynamic Pricing’ to begin. Again, use the Pricing table option to decide where you want it to appear. Next, create a discount rule for Buy 3 products from the Winter Stock to get 15 percent off on all items from the Summer Stock. Here’s how:

  • First, use the drop-down menu to set ‘Offer type’ to ‘Buy X Get Y’.
  • Then, fill the ‘Label’ field to display information about the discount.
  • Use the ‘Applies to’ the drop-down menu to select which products you’d like to apply the quantity-based discounts to. Our example applies the discount to ‘Specific categories’.
  • Set the ‘Buy’ option to ‘3’ and the ‘Get’ option to ‘1’. You can also set a maximum number of items a customer can purchase to qualify for the quantity discount.
  • Set the ‘Adjustment type’ to ‘Percentage Discount’ and the ‘Amount’ to ’15’.
  • Use the ‘“Buy” categories’ option to select a qualifying category of products a customers has to purchase.
  • Use the ‘“Get” categories’ option to select the category of products customers can get a discount on.

When customers add three products from the Winter Stock category to their cart, they’ll get a 15 percent discount on a product from the Summer Stock.

Preview of WooCommerce discounts on the front-end

From here, you can play around with the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts configuration settings to create different types of discounts – for example, a Buy One Get One Free or Buy X of Product A to get Product B at half price deal.

Use case #3: Sell to wholesale buyers

If you sell to both Business-to-Customer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B) customers, you might want to set up WooCommerce quantity-based pricing for specific user roles only. For example, you might want to offer customers with the Wholesale Buyer user role a 20 percent discount when they purchase 75 (or more) units.

How to create user role based WooCommerce discounts

To start, head to ‘WooCommerce > Settings > Fees and Discounts > User Role Pricing’. Next, set the ‘Adjustment’ drop-down menu next to the ‘Wholesale Buyer’ user role to ‘Percentage Discount’. Click the Save changes button to proceed.

Now, whenever a wholesale buyer logs into their user account and adds products to cart, they’ll get a 20 percent discount on their purchase.

Offering a percentage-based discount in this way helps you to clear old inventory and boost sales. Wholesale buyers sometimes have more interest in purchasing products at a lower cost per unit too. WooCommerce Fees and Discounts is the easiest way to offer user role based WooCommerce quantity discounts.

We have lots more to say on how to create a WooCommerce wholesale store, elsewhere on the Plugin Republic blog. If this is a strategy you want to follow, it’s essential reading.

Conclusion

Your e-commerce business can benefit from offering WooCommerce quantity discounts during end of season or clearance sales. It’s a great way to reduce the cost per product and help customers to buy more. Also, you’re able to save on shipping and handling overheads too.

In this post, we’ve looked at how to apply WooCommerce discounts in a number of ways. To recap:

  • The WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin is the easiest way to set up discounts and quantity-based pricing in WooCommerce.
  • By offering WooCommerce discounts, you can effectively clear out old inventory and increase your average order value.
  • WooCommerce quantity discounts are useful for store owners that sell to both B2B and B2C customers.
WooCommerce Fees and Discounts featured image

WooCommerce Fees and Discounts

Create powerful pricing incentives quickly and easily

Find Out More

Can you think of other ways to offer WooCommerce quantity discounts? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

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