How to set up WooCommerce dynamic pricing rules

Pricing SEOM Plugin Republic

Out of the box, WooCommerce doesn’t let you set up dynamic discounts. In order to offer discounts to customers based on their selected product, you’ll need to configure  WooCommerce dynamic pricing rules within WordPress. This way, you can encourage customers to buy more from you, boost sales, and build a loyal customer base.

In this tutorial, we’ll explain different discount strategies you can implement. We’ll also show you different ways to set up WooCommerce dynamic pricing rules on your eCommerce store. Plus, we have a demo site where you can see several examples from the article.

What WooCommerce dynamic pricing is

WooCommerce dynamic pricing is a way to offer discounts and charge different prices based on the product bundles or quantities your customers select.

Let’s take a look at some examples of dynamic pricing:

  • Buy One Get One Free (BOGOF).  You can actually use this for any combination of discounted items accompanying a full-price purchase. For example, if a customer buys a bag of ground coffee, they will get another for free. Alternatively, you can also choose to give out a free pack of filters to customers who purchase a bag of ground coffee. You can class both of these as BOGOF offers.
  • Bulk pricing. This will give customers a discounted price if they buy single products in larger quantities. For instance, you can offer a ten percent cart discount if the customer buys over six units of a product. This way, you motivate customers to buy more from you, which will increase the Average Order Value (AOV).
  • Discounts based on the cart total. By offering discounts based on the order subtotal, customers are more likely to purchase more from your WooCommerce store than they planned to. For example, you can offer customers a discount when an order subtotal exceeds a specific dollar threshold. Customers will then have an incentive to buy more.
  • Increasing prices and adding fees. When you’re low on inventory, or have limited stock left, you can increase the price for the customer. You might also add Handling charges or Processing fees as additional fees to your products. This can increase the overall price of your product which, in turn, can help you meet costs and increase revenue.

Of all of these examples of advanced dynamic pricing for WooCommerce, we’d suggest that the latter carries more risk. However, there are lots of reasons to still use this pricing technique. We’ll cover these next.

4 reasons to use WooCommerce dynamic pricing

Setting WooCommerce dynamic pricing rules can help you execute all sorts of discount strategies. As a result, you can sell more products through your online store.

Before we jump into different ways to set up WooCommerce dynamic pricing, let’s take a look at some reasons why you might want to implement it. 

1. You can sell more products

With dynamic pricing for WooCommerce, you can set up discount rules to incentivize customers to buy from your store instead of competitors. You can also encourage them to buy more products at the sale price.

This is a great way to attract new customers to your store and potentially increase sales.

Dynamic pricing example chart.

As you can see, static pricing is too restricting and makes you miss out on extra revenue opportunities. 

For example, you can adapt the pricing according to demand and make sure that you’re always relevant – increase price during peak demand and offer discounts when consumption isn’t as high.

2. You’re able to clear out old inventory

As an online store owner, the last thing you’d want to do is carry old stock. As such, you need to clear inventory on a regular basis to ensure there’s room for future products. The consequence of not doing this can be extra expenditure on your end, which will eat into your profits and the stress of finding additional warehouse space.

Setting up a BOGOF offer on variable products is one way to clear out old inventory fast – a free pack of chocolate muffins with every box of ground coffee, for example. You can do this with apparel too. For example, adding a free t-shirt with an older design if customers buy two pairs of jeans.

3. You can offer free products

Offering free gifts on your WooCommerce store is a great way to add attraction to your marketing campaign. It can incentivize customers to buy more from you in order to get the free gift and help you attract new customers.

You can also get customers to try out new products by handing them out as free gifts. For example, if your customers buy a dress from you, you can add a face mask to their order as a free gift.

4. You’re able to implement a price reduction strategy

If your WooCommerce products don’t sell as well as you’d hoped, you could implement a price reduction strategy. This way, you can sell products in larger quantities and make sure your stock sells before you add new items to your inventory. 

A price reduction strategy through automation or coupons can help your business attract new customers and boost sales. With customers buying larger quantities from you, the average order value will also increase. For example, if you sell homemade pickles, selling a pack of three pickle jars for $12.99 instead of selling one pickle jar for $6.99 can help you generate more sales. 

WooCommerce dynamic pricing plugin

All of the examples of dynamic pricing discount types in the next part of this tutorial use the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin. This is one of the best WordPress extensions in order to give you multiple options for creating dynamic WooCommerce pricing rules.

WooCommerce Fees and Discounts featured image

WooCommerce Fees and Discounts

Create powerful pricing incentives quickly and easily

Find Out More

However, before we showcase some of the use cases for this plugin, let’s look at some types of WooCommerce dynamic pricing in more detail.

Types of WooCommerce dynamic pricing

Here, we’ll take a look at different types of WooCommerce dynamic pricing and help you decide which one you should implement on your WooCommerce store.

1. Bulk pricing

Bulk pricing is one of the most effective ways of increasing sales and profit on your WooCommerce store. Since cost-effective products appeal to almost everyone, you make sure customers buy more from you so they can qualify for discounts. If you offer a discount, customers could end up buying more than they had planned to.

Bulk pricing discounts or quantity discounts give customers a price-based special offer based on the quantity they order. In simple words, the more they buy, the lower the price per unit they’ll have to pay. 

Bulk pricing WooCommerce front-end example.

The good news is that bulk pricing discounts are pretty easy to set up. You can also create different discount levels or tiers to cater to customers with different requirements. For example, your first discount tier could offer your customers a small discount for buying between 10–25 WooCommerce products, then a larger discount for greater quantities.

Related Tutorial
Check out this detailed tutorial to find out more about bulk pricing in WooCommerce

containers

2. Discounts based on the cart total

These are discount tiers based on the total value of your customer’s order. You’ll set them through a WooCommerce dynamic pricing rule. This means when customers add products to their cart and the checkout order value exceeds the minimum specified amount, they will receive a discount.

For instance, you can set a discount if the order value reaches above a certain monetary value. Your customers will qualify for the discount regardless of the number of products in the cart. 

You can encourage customers to buy more from your store by setting up WooCommerce discounts based on the order total, whether that’s through automation or coupons. It can help you increase customer retention and gain brand-loyal customers. Also, offering discounts based on the order subtotal is one of the best ways to increase the average order value and boost sales for your WooCommerce store. 

Knowing when to offer discounts on the order total is important too. It makes sense to offer discounts on the order total if you’re offering store-wide discounts. For example, you can do this during clearance sales, which can help you clear out old inventory.

3. BOGOF

Buy One Get One Free WooCommerce checkout example.

BOGOF is a popular dynamic pricing strategy that can help you increase sales on your WooCommerce store. Depending on the types of products you sell, you can set up different types of BOGOF offers. One of the main reasons for setting up BOGOF offers is to incentivize customers to buy more from you. By offering discounts with each purchase, you motivate customers to buy more than they usually would.

The typical and literal definition would see you offer one free cap when a customer purchases a cap from your clothing store. However, you could also offer a free cap with every two t-shirts purchased from your WooCommerce store.

You might also use BOGOF to offer the second product at a discounted rate. For example, if your customer decides to buy a jacket from your WooCommerce store, they can receive a further discount on related items.

BOGOF offers work for free gifts too. It’s a great way to get rid of products that aren’t selling well on your e-commerce store, or give out new products you want to promote.

Related Tutorial
Here’s a dedicated tutorial on creating a buy one get one free offer in WooCommerce

WooCommerce buy one get one free

4. Discount tiers

Discount tiers offer a price reduction based on the number of units a customer purchases from your WooCommerce store. For instance, you could drop the price per product once your customers meet the minimum product quantity threshold. If you sell Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products and subscriptions on your WooCommerce store, choosing to offer discount tiers might be a good idea.

WooCommerce will often automate this. For example, if customers exceed the amount specified in the first discount tier, they’ll move on to the next one without input and receive a larger discount.

Discount tiers WooCommerce example.

Consider a discount tier of 1–20 at $20 per item. Customers who want to purchase more than 20 units will get a better price per unit at $18 each from the next tier. You can also set multiple discount tiers that will offer your customer an even better per-unit price.

Related Tutorial
This article will tell you everything you need to know about tiered pricing discounts in WooCommerce

WooCommerce tiered pricing using the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin

4 ways to set up dynamic pricing in WooCommerce

Next, we’re going to look at four different ways you can set up WooCommerce dynamic pricing rules on your online store.

Again, we’re going to use the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin here, which is a flexible way to set up WooCommerce pricing rules and has compatibility with the e-commerce platform. As such, you’ll need to have an understanding of the plugin in order to follow along.

1. Bulk pricing

A bulk pricing discount is often a percentage or fixed price discount based on the number of products a customer purchases. Let’s look at some different bulk pricing variations you can use.

Discounts on specific products

To set up a bulk pricing discount, navigate to WooCommerce > Fees and Discounts within WordPress, and add a new rule:

Setting up a pricing rule to offer discounts on specific products.

Next, configure the dynamic pricing rules as follows:

  1. You should set the Offer type to Bulk Pricing.
  2. For the Applies to drop-down menu, choose Specific products. This is so you can specify the exact product that the offer applies to.
  3. Next, set one or more Tiers to specify how you apply your bulk pricing discounts. For our example, we use a tier for quantities between 10 and 20 and one for quantities between 21 and 50. 

Once you save your changes, you’ll see the dynamic pricing show up on the frontend of your WooCommerce store:

A bulk pricing discount on the WooCommerce front end.

We have a demo product for this to see how it looks on a live site. For more information, you’ll also want to take a look at our tutorial on how to set up WooCommerce bulk discounts.

Discounts on specific product categories

You could also create a bulk discount for products in specific categories. In this example, we’ll set up bulk discounts for all products for the Summer Stock category:

Setting up discounts on specific product categories.

These settings are almost similar to the bulk pricing discount rule above, except:

  • You’ll want to choose Specific categories from the Applies to menu. This will specify which products the offer applies to. 
  • From the “Buy” categories menu, enter the category or categories that the discount rule applies to. 

This will include all products in the specified WooCommerce categories within your discounting strategy. Here’s how this will look:

Specific product discounts on the WooCommerce front end.

Again, we have a live demo of this if you want to see how it looks and operates on the front end.

Discounts on all products

You can offer a discount on all products for your WooCommerce store too, and the process follows a similar setup to the previous two: 

Setting up a pricing rule for bulk pricing on all products.

Here, you’ll want to change the Applies to option to All items but leave everything else as per the other dynamic pricing types. This will apply the bulk pricing discount to all of your products in your WooCommerce store.

2. Role-based dynamic pricing

You’re also able to set up role-based dynamic pricing within WooCommerce. This way, you can charge different prices for the same products depending on the customer’s user role. 

To do this, first navigate to the WooCommerce > Settings > Fees and Discounts screen within WordPress, and check the Enable User Role Pricing option.

The Fees and Discounts page within WooCommerce.

From here, you can either set global role-based discounts that will apply to all products, or you can set discounts per product.

Setting global role-based dynamic prices

To set global role-based dynamic pricing, click on the User Role Pricing tab from the General screen. You’ll see a list of all roles with the option to set an adjustment and amount against each one.

The process here is straightforward. For example, if you want to grant the Customer user role a ten percent discount on all products, you’ll enter this within the Amount field:

The User Role Pricing screen within WooCommerce.

Also, make sure you change the Adjustment drop-down menu to Percentage Discount. This will then apply in the correct way.

Setting product-specific role-based dynamic prices

If you prefer to set individual product discounts, there’s a way to do this:

  1. Navigate to Products > All Products and select the product you want to edit. 
  2. Click on the Edit button to open the Edit Product page.
  3. Click on the User Roles tab in the Product data section. 

In the Adjustment row, select Percentage Discount, and in the Amount row, enter the discount amount:

The Product Data metabox for an individual product.

You’ll do this for every product you wish to apply this pricing to, then save your changes.

Setting specific user role-based prices per product

If you don’t want to apply universal discounts or fees to products for different user roles, you can enter different prices per product for certain roles.

To select which roles you enable for role-based pricing, head to WooCommerce > Settings > Fees and Discounts > User Role Pricing, then enter the roles in the Role Price Fields setting.

You can enter as many roles as you like here, and this will create a separate price field for each selected role:

Setting a regular price within WooCommerce.

If you want to learn more about this facet of WooCommerce dynamic pricing, we have a tutorial that will make for essential reading.

#3: BOGOF

We can set up a BOGOF offer with ease using WooCommerce dynamic pricing rules. First, navigate to WooCommerce > Fees and Discounts and add a new rule.

From here, you’ll want to configure the pricing rules as follows:

  1. Offer type: Buy X Get X.
  2. Applies to: Specific products. This is so you can specify the exact product that the offer applies to.
  3. Buy: Here, enter the number of products the customer needs to buy to qualify for the BOGOF offer.
  4. Get: This field should contain how many products the customer will receive at the adjusted rate once they qualify.
  5. Adjustment type: Percentage Discount. This is so you can calculate the price discount as a percentage of the product price.
  6. Amount: 100 – in order reduce the price by 100 percent.
  7. “Buy” products: This is a list of products that the offer applies to.

Here’s how this will look on the front end…

Previewing a BOGOF deal on the WooCommerce front end.

…and here’s how it looks in the cart:

A BOGOF offer within the WooCommerce cart.

However, this isn’t all you can do with BOGOF offers. Let’s look at some more examples next.

Buy one product and get a different product free

You can also offer a different product as part of your BOGOF offer. To set this up in WooCommerce, navigate to WooCommerce > Fees and Discounts, and add a new rule.

Setting up a pricing rule to offer BOGOF pricing for different products.

Configure it as follows:

  1. Offer type: Buy X Get Y.
  2. Label: This is optional text to add under the price label on the product.
  3. Applies to: Specific products. This is so you can specify the exact products that the offer applies to.
  4. Buy: Here, enter how many products the customer needs to buy to qualify for the offer.
  5. Get: Next, enter how many products the customer will receive at the adjusted rate once they qualify.
  6. Max Items: This will be the maximum number of items the customer can receive for free.
  7. Adjustment type: Percentage Discount. Here, adjust the price of the free item 100 percent in order to make it free.
  8. Amount: 100, because you’ll reduce the price by 100 percent.
  9. Buy” products: This is a list of products that the offer applies to.
  10. “Get” products: This is the list of products that will have their price adjusted if the customer purchases a product from the list.

Here’s how this will look on the frontend of your WooCommerce store:

The preview for setting up BOGOF pricing for different products in the cart.

As with many of these examples, you’ll also want to check out the demo BOGOF product to see how a live site looks.

Buy one product and discount a different product

You can create an offer that gives customers a second product at a discounted rate. To do this in WooCommerce, head to WooCommerce > Settings > Fees and Discounts, and add a new rule:

A pricing rule showing BOGOF pricing on discounted products.

Here’s how to set up the dynamic pricing rules:

  1. Offer type: Buy X Get Y.
  2. Label: This is optional text to add under the price label on the product.
  3. Applies to: Specific products, so you can specify the exact products that the offer applies to.
  4. Count: ‘Product’. This dynamic pricing rule will count products, hence the choice here.
  5. Buy: This is how many products the customer needs to buy to qualify for the offer.
  6. Get: This will be how many products the customer will receive at the adjusted rate once they qualify.
  7. Adjustment type: ‘Fixed Discount’. This will let us use a fixed price amount as the discount.
  8. Amount: ’5’. The figure here represents the reduction.
  9. “Buy” products: This is a list of products that the offer applies to.
  10. “Get” products: This is the list of products that will have their price adjusted if the customer purchases a product from the list.

Here’s how this looks in the cart:

The BOGOF discounted product preview within WooCommerce.

It’s a straightforward way to set up a WooCommerce dynamic pricing rule, but you can also discount based on the order total. We’ll look at this next

#4: Discounts by order total

Offering discounts by order total is a great way to incentivize customers to buy more from you. To do this, navigate to WooCommerce > Fees and Discounts, and add a new rule:

Setting up a pricing rule for the discount order total.

Here’s how you can set up the WooCommerce dynamic pricing rule:

  1. Offer type: Order Total
  2. Label: This is optional text to add under the price label on the product.
  3. Min total: 1. You’ll want to set this to 1 to offer a discount on the order total, regardless of how many items are in the cart.
  4. Adjustment type: Percentage Discount
  5. Amount: 5. This figure is the percentage discount as a numerical value.

Here’s what it will look like in the cart:

The front end of WooCommerce showing a discount on the order total.

As you can see, with the right plugin, you have a lot of flexibility to create WooCommerce dynamic pricing rules. If you want a visual guide on how to achieve bulk pricing, BOGOF, and discount by order totals, check out our video walkthrough:

Conclusion

The WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin is a top-tier way to set up WooCommerce dynamic pricing rules for your online store. You can implement one or more discounting strategies to attract new customers to your store, boost your average order value, and grow your bottom line.

Ready to start setting up WooCommerce dynamic pricing rules on your store? Get the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin today!

WooCommerce Fees and Discounts featured image

WooCommerce Fees and Discounts

Create powerful pricing incentives quickly and easily

Find Out More

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