How to create tiered pricing in WooCommerce [+video]

Adding WooCommerce tiered pricing to your online store is a great way to encourage customers to buy more products per transaction. With tiered pricing, the total cost reduces as customers increase the quantity of items purchased.

WooCommerce doesn’t have a built-in solution for tiered pricing so you’ll need an additional plugin. The WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin will let you add price tiers to single and multiple products quickly and easily.

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about WooCommerce tiered pricing, including:

• What is tiered pricing in WooCommerce?
• Examples of the tiered pricing model
• How tiered pricing might benefit your business
• Introducing the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin
• How to create tiered pricing rules using the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin

Let’s start by explaining what tiered pricing is in the context of WooCommerce.

What is tiered pricing in WooCommerce?

In its simplest form, a tiered pricing strategy is where you offer customers a discount based on how many unit products they purchase. The more units they purchase, the greater the discount.

With a tiered pricing model, you offer customers a lower rate per product once the product quantity threshold you’ve specified is met. Let’s say, for example, you create four tiers:

• 1-20 units cost $15 each
• 21-50 units cost $10 each
• 51-75 units cost $8.50 each
• 76 units and above cost $7 each

If a customer places an order for 60 units, they would pay 60 * 8.50 = $510

As a store owner looking to implement a tiered pricing strategy, the first thing you need to do is define a price per unit within a range. These ranges will be your tiers.

Let’s step through some quick example of when you might consider implementing a tiered pricing model.

Examples of the tiered pricing model

There are many scenarios where you might consider following a tiered pricing structure.

Example #1: SaaS products and subscriptions

If you have a SaaS product, you might consider selling subscriptions or licenses using tiered pricing.

Data plans:

• 3GB for $40 per month
• 5GB for $55 per month
• 10GB for $75 per month

Email marketing services:

• 0 to 2,000 contacts for $1.99 per month
• 2,000 to 10,000 contacts for $3.99 per month
• 10,000 to 20,000 contacts for $9.99 per month

Example #2: Wholesale goods and bulk purchases

If you’re a wholesale seller, you can maximize profits by selling using tiered pricing. Since units purchased from lower tiers cost more than those in higher tiers, you’ll end up making more money than if you were to go with a volume pricing strategy.

This is great for store owners that sell wholesale goods (such as apparel, cookware sets, sports equipment, and mobile accessories) or hardware products (such as screws, nuts, and bolts).

Find out how to create a wholesale store in WooCommerce here.

Example #3: Discounts

Instead of selling WooCommerce products following a tiered pricing model, you can do things a little differently and offer discounts following the same pricing structure. In other words, you would offer a larger discount for a higher tier purchase.

Customers who purchase:

• 1-20 units get 5% off
• 21-50 units get 7% off
• 51-75 units get 10% off
• 76 and above units get 12% off

You can also use this system to offer quantity discounts.

Example #4: Photography

If you’re a photographer, you might consider creating packages using tiered pricing. For example, you could offer three different packages:

• Up to 65 photos and 10 retouches for $200
• 66 to 85 photos and 15 retouches for $175
• 86 to 100 photos and 15 retouches for $165

Tiered pricing is great for businesses that sell products and for businesses offering services. Depending on the type of business you’re running, you might charge customers a different price or offer a discount for each tier.

How tiered pricing might benefit your business

Here are some of the key benefits of the tiered pricing model:

• Encourages customers to buy larger quantities of a product. Tiered pricing entices customers to purchase more units per transaction with the promise of reduced costs for units bought from higher tiers. This is a great way to increase your average order value.
• Lets you offer options, choices, and add-ons. With tiered pricing, you have room to offer customers various pricing options that can ultimately help you increase your bottom line. Following our photography example, a customer might purchase your entry-level package and upgrade to a mid-tier if they’re satisfied with the service.

Introducing the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin

Out of the box, WooCommerce doesn’t let you create a tiered pricing structure for your products. The easiest way to get started is by using the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin to create tiered pricing in WooCommerce.

WooCommerce Fees and Discounts is a robust WooCommerce tiered pricing plugin that works with any theme and is designed to help you maximize profits.

• Dynamic pricing rules. You can set different prices or offer discounts by creating dynamic pricing rules in WooCommerce. For instance, purchase 1 to 10 units at $0.99 per unit and purchase 10 to 20 units at $0.85 per unit.
• Bulk pricing discounts. This WooCommerce tiered pricing plugin lets you automatically apply different discounts for products based on the quantity added to the cart. This is the easiest way to create multiple pricing tiers. The plugin also displays the pricing tiers you create in a neat table layout.
• User role based pricing. The user role based pricing feature makes it easy for store owners to create different pricing tiers for different customers. This is great for stores that sell to both B2B and B2C customers. For more information, check out this article on user role pricing in WooCommerce.

As you can probably guess, explaining tiered pricing to customers can be difficult. WooCommerce Fees and Discounts lets you display pricing tiers in a neat table layout which makes it easy for customers to understand the breakdown of charges. It also displays the discounted price (along with how much you’ve saved) in the shopping cart at checkout.

Additionally, it comes with built-in features to offer bulk pricing with fine-grained control over WooCommerce products. It’s also worth mentioning that the plugin gives you tons of options for payment gateways.

WooCommerce tiered pricing – video

This short video shows you three methods for creating tiered pricing in WooCommerce.

How to create tiered pricing rules using the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin

Here, we’ll explain how you can create WooCommerce tiered pricing rules using the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin. For this tutorial, we’ll assume you already have WooCommerce set up on your WordPress website and some WooCommerce products added to your online store.

Install and activate the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin

Get the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin and install it to your WordPress website.

Once you’ve activated the plugin, head over to WooCommerce > Settings > Fees and Discounts > License to enter your license key.

Enable the dynamic pricing option

Before you can begin creating WooCommerce pricing tiers, you need to enable the dynamic pricing option. To do this, navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Fees and Discounts and ensure that the ‘Enable Dynamic Pricing’ option is ticked.

Click the Save changes button to proceed.

We’ll look at three different methods to create price tiers for your WooCommerce products.

Method #1: Create tiered pricing rules for individual products

The simplest way to create pricing tiers is on individual products. Edit the product where you would like to set the tiers and scroll down to the ‘Product data’ section.

You’ll see the ‘Regular price’ then a section below for ‘Discounts’. In this section:

• Set ‘Rule’ to ‘Bulk Pricing’
• Set the ‘Status’ to ‘Active’ (assuming you are ready for the discount to go live)
• Add your tiers by clicking the ‘Add new tier’ button for each pricing tier required

For each tier, set:

• Min: The minimum quantity of product required to qualify for the tier
• Max: The maximum number
• Type: The discount type – in this case it’s ‘Tiered’
• Amount: The product price within that tier
• Label: An optional label to display on the pricing table

Publish or update the product and the price tiers will now be active.

When the user updates the quantity, the product price will change dynamically. So, in our example, if the user updates the quantity field to 11, the first price tier will kick in and the product price will adjust to $19, down from $20.

When the user adds the product to the cart, the discounted pricing is displayed:

See below for some other options like pricing tables, setting a sales flash and scheduling the discount.

Method #2: Create tiered pricing for multiple products

If you have multiple products with the same base price and the same price tiers, you can create a single pricing rule. Go to WooCommerce > Fees and Discounts and click ‘Add New’.

In the settings above, you’ll notice the following:

• Rule: Set this to ‘Bulk Pricing’
• Status: Set this to ‘Active’ if you’re ready to activate the tiered pricing
• Applies to: Use this setting to define what products to apply the rule to. It could be ‘All products’, ‘Specific categories’ or ‘Specific products’. In our example, we’ve chosen specific products so we’ve entered those products below
• Tiers: As with the example above, here you can specify the exact pricing tiers

Method #3: Tiered pricing for products with different base prices

Finally, let’s look at a way to save time by setting tiers for products with different base prices. Instead of setting the tiers for each product separately, you can create a single rule

Instead of assigning a set price to each tier, you can apply a discount from the base price. So you can discount $1 per item in the first tier, $2 per item in the second tier, and so on. This way, it doesn’t matter what the product’s original price is.

Alternatively, you could discount by a percentage rather than a fixed amount. So discount 10% for the first tier, 20% for the second tier, etc.

To do this, just update the rule you created above. In the ‘Tiers’ setting, change the ‘Type’ to either a fixed or percentage discount.

You also need to change the values in the ‘Adjustment’ column. Instead of the fixed price, you’ll need to enter the amount by which the base price will be reduced.

Options for incentivizing your customers

It’s important to let your customers know about your pricing strategy. Fees and Discounts provides a number of ways to promote your price tiers.

Display a pricing table

Once you’ve created your price tiers, you need to let the customer know that they exist. The simplest way to do this is with a tiered price table.

A table displays information neatly – including the quantity levels for each tier, the price per tier, and some additional information like the discount per tier.

To customize the price table, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Fees and Discounts > Dynamic Pricing and update the options there.

Sales flashes

WooCommerce will automatically display a ‘Sale!’ label on any product that has a sale price. You can extend this by setting a label for any products with pricing tiers.

In WooCommerce > Settings > Fees and Discounts > Dynamic Pricing, set the ‘Add Sale flash’ setting to ‘Replace with label’.

Enter some text in the ‘Label’ setting:

This text will be displayed on the front end. It works with any theme and will match your theme’s styles.

Notices

Another way to incentivize users is to tell them how many more items they need to add to their cart in order to qualify for the next tier’s discount.

To enable these notices, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Fees and Discounts > Notices and enable the ‘Bulk notice’. You can enter custom text for your notice and use dynamic tags to display quantity and amounts.

Conclusion

Most businesses can benefit from selling using a WooCommerce tiered pricing strategy. We explained what tiered pricing is and how you can create tiered pricing rules in WooCommerce using a plugin.

To recap:

• A WooCommerce tiered pricing strategy lets you offer customers a lower rate per product once the product quantity threshold you’ve specified is met
• WooCommerce tiered pricing lets you offer valuable discounts to customers while maximizing your profits and increasing your average order value
• The easiest way to create a tiered pricing structure for your store is by using the WooCommerce Fees and Discounts