How to easily set up WooCommerce bulk discounts [2023]

Providing bulk discounts (also called volume discounts) helps your business delight shoppers, acquire and retain customers, and ultimately increase sales and revenue. In this detailed tutorial, we'll show you how to add a WooCommerce bulk discount plugin to your online store in just a few simple steps.

Searching for a way to set up bulk discounts in your WooCommerce store?

Offering discounts for bulk orders is an extremely popular and highly effective marketing/pricing strategy. Bulk discounts are a great tool to encourage customers to buy more, which drives sales and boosts conversions and revenue in your online store.

Unfortunately, the option to create bulk discounts isn't built into WooCommerce by default. But there is good news: You can easily add this using a Woocommerce bulk discount plugin — which we'll show you to do.

Here's an overview of what we'll cover in this tutorial: We'll begin with a general introduction to the bulk discount pricing strategy, its benefits, and how it works. Then, we'll show you step-by-step how to create bulk discounts using YITH WooCommerce dynamic pricing and discounts, the best bulk discount WooCommerce plugin.

YITH WooCommerce dynamic pricing and discounts is a powerful plugin that lets you create virtually any type of bulk discount in your eCommerce store. You can use this plugin to add basic and advanced bulk discount rules to your online store with just a few clicks.

Best of all, it's super easy for new and seasoned WooCommerce users to configure. As a result, you can reap the benefits of running bulk discount campaigns in your own WooCommerce store.

Ready for a deep dive into WooCommerce bulk discounts? Let's get started!

What is a bulk discount?

A bulk discount (also known as a volume discount) is a marketing/pricing strategy where you offer customers a reduced price for buying products in larger quantities. The discount can be in the form of a fixed amount or a percentage off the regular price.

You can set up bulk discounts in various ways in your online store using a good bulk discount WooCommerce plugin. For example, you can create amount-based discounts, percentage discounts, tiered price discounts, and more.

Because bulk discounts are applied based on the number of products being purchased, they encourage customers to buy more and lead to an increase in the average order value. Bulk discounts also benefit customers because they get to unlock lower prices per product or order. 

What is the difference between a bulk discount and a regular discount?

The key difference between bulk and regular discounts is that bulk discounts are quantity-based; in comparison, there are no quantity requirements for regular discounts.

Essentially, a bulk discount is a reduction in the price of a product when customers buy in larger quantities. For example, your store might offer a 20% discount per item for customers that buy three or more products.

On the other hand, a regular discount is a reduction in the price of a product regardless of the quantity that the customer purchases. For example, if your store offers a set discount of 20% on all orders, irrespective of the number of products the customer buys. Or, you could offer a 5% fixed discount on selected products with no minimum order quantity.

Benefits of bulk discounts

There are tons of benefits to providing discounts on bulk orders in your eCommerce store. Let's look at the top ones:

Key benefits

What should you use bulk discounts for?

Here are some specific situations where you might want to run bulk discount promotions in your online store:

1. Clearing stock: Volume discounts encourage customers to buy more, making them an effective tool for clearing excess inventory or slow-moving products. Offering bulk discounts on items that have been lying around in your warehouse for some time is usually a good idea.
2. Increasing average order value: You can set thresholds where the bulk discount applies — for example, a "Buy 3 items, Get 1 Free" offer. This encourages customers to add more products to the shopping cart to unlock the discount, which boosts your store's revenue from each order.
3. Promoting new products: When launching new products, offering bulk discounts can help generate interest and encourage customers to try them out. This helps to create buzz, drive initial sales, and collect valuable feedback and reviews.
4. Encouraging repeat business: There are many ways to adjust your bulk discounting strategy in order to foster customer loyalty and encourage repeat orders. For example, you could reward customers with special pricing for recurring bulk purchases. This helps build long-term relationships with customers, increases customer lifetime value, and reduces the likelihood of losing them to competitors.
5. Seasonal sales: Research shows that customers tend to buy more during festive periods or special occasions, such as holidays or festivals. You can lean into seasonal events and offer limited-time bulk discounts to drive sales in your store. 

Use cases for bulk discounts in WooCommerce

Every type of eCommerce store can provide volume discounts. Below, we've outlined a few use-case examples where the bulk discount strategy works well:

1. Wholesale stores: B2B customers typically buy products in huge quantities. If you run a store that primarily sells to other businesses, you can encourage them to buy even larger quantities using various bulk discount strategies.
2. Retail stores: The same principle applies here — after all, every customer appreciates getting good deals. Similar to B2B stores, retailers can use bulk discounts to boost conversions and revenue and increase customer satisfaction. 
3. Non-profits: Charitable organizations often require large quantities of products for events, fundraisers, or donations. Offering bulk discounts to non-profits is a great way to support their mission, build goodwill, and foster long-term relationships.
4. Event organizers: If you're selling event tickets, such as conferences or trade shows, offering bulk pricing can help increase event registrations and boost ticket sales. You could offer discounted rates for group purchases to encourage attendees to bring additional people along.

How to create WooCommerce bulk discounts

In this section of the tutorial, we'll answer questions like:

• How do I create a bulk discount in WooCommerce?
• How do you set a discount on all products in WooCommerce?
• How do I apply a bulk discount to an order?
• How to set up WooCommerce bulk discounts

Let's dive in.

How do I create a bulk discount in WooCommerce?

As we covered earlier, WooCommerce doesn't include a bulk discount feature by default. So for this tutorial, we'll use the best bulk discount WooCommerce plugin, YITH WooCommerce dynamic pricing and discounts.

YITH WooCommerce dynamic pricing and discounts is super flexible — it can handle various types of bulk discount rules and works well on all kinds of eCommerce stores. Plus, it only takes a few minutes to set it up on your website.

Stores that use the YITH WooCommerce dynamic pricing and discounts plugin can: 

Bulk discount strategies for WooCommerce stores

As with every other type of marketing campaign, it's essential to be strategic with bulk discount promotions. While designing your campaigns, you need to consider factors like your target customer base, products, goals, profitability margin, and other crucial elements.

Here are a few types of bulk discounts that you can create with the YITH WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing and Discounts plugin:

1. Amount-based discounts: You can define specific quantity thresholds for WooCommerce products, and when customers purchase quantities above these thresholds, they become eligible for a discounted price. For instance, you could offer a flat $25 discount if a customer buys ten or more products.
2. Percentage discounts: Instead of discounts on fixed amounts, you can offer percentage-based discounts. For instance, you could choose to provide a 5% discount for orders of five to ten items or a 15% discount for orders above ten items.
3. Tiered price discounts: The tiered discounts approach allows you to offer different price levels based on the cart total. For example, you can set a price of $10 per item for orders up to 10 products, $8 per item for orders between 11 and 20 products, $6 per item for orders above 20 products, and so on. Essentially, this means that the discount value increases based on the increase in quantity of products purchased. 
4. Role-based discounts: You can offer special pricing based on specific user roles that customers are registered in WordPress, such as wholesale customers or VIP members. For example, you can provide a 15% discount on all products for wholesale customers or offer exclusive deals to premium members.

Note

YITH WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing and Discounts is a full-featured dynamic pricing plugin. It lets you set up dynamic pricing and various types of discounts in addition to bulk discounts. For example, you can create time-sensitive offers, buy one get one free (BOGO) deals, buy X get Y free, gift products, special offers, and much more. 

This post is about creating bulk discounts, so we will focus on that. If you want to know more about its other capabilities, head over to the dedicated plugin page.

How to set up WooCommerce bulk discounts

Now, it's time to configure the YITH WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing and Discounts plugin and use it to set up WooCommerce bulk discounts on your store. Here are the steps you need to follow:

Step 1: Plugin installation and activation

The installation and activation process is similar to any other plugin:

1. Purchase the plugin from the official YITH website. 
2. Download the ZIP file to your computer. 
3. Sign in to your site's WordPress admin dashboard. 
4. Navigate to Plugins → Add New and select the "Upload Plugin" button. 
5. Choose the plugin ZIP file you just downloaded and click Install Now → Activate.

Step 2: Activate your license

You need to activate your license for the plugin to work:

1. Log into your account on yithemes.com and navigate to the "Licenses and Downloads" tab to copy your plugin license key.
2. Head back to your WordPress admin dashboard. Navigate to YITH → License Activation.
3. Enter the email address for your yithemes.com account and your license key.

Step 3: Create a new discount rule for bulk purchases

Before we begin: Navigate to WooCommerce → Settings → General and enable the "coupons" option. If you don't enable this option, you won't be able to configure the YITH plugin.

1. Navigate to YITH → Dynamic Pricing → Discounts & Price Rules and click on the "Create Rule" button within your WordPress admin dashboard.
2. First, enter a name for the rule. This name is just for internal purposes, so keep it simple and descriptive.
3. Toggle on the "Active rule" button to enable it.
4. Next, assign a priority to the rule. "1" is the highest priority. You can add unlimited rules to your store at the same time. This means, the priority you set determines which one will be applied first to customers' orders. 
5. Finally, select "Quantity Discount" from the "Rule type" menu.

Step 4: Set conditions for the bulk discount rule

Now, it's time to customize the bulk discount rule:

1. Choose whether to apply the rule to all products, specific products, specific product categories, or specific product tags.
2. Toggle on the "Exclude products from this rule" button if you don't want this discount rule to be applied to individual products. You can exclude particular products, specific categories, and specific product tags. 
3. If you enabled the previous option, you can now enter the specific products to be excluded. If you didn't enable the previous option, skip this step and move to the next one.
4. Enter the details of the discount rule to be applied in the "Discount Rules" section. You can select the type of discount to be applied, i.e., percentage, fixed amount, or fixed price. Also, you can enter the number of products for the discount to be applied to.
5. Next, choose how the plugin counts the number of items that the customer selects in the "Quantity rule will check" option. Select the appropriate option based on your campaign. 
6. Toggle on the "Show quantity & prices in a table" button. This adds a pricing table that shows the product quantity and prices to the product pages on your store.
   
7. Enable the "Show discount in loop" button to show the discounted product price in the loop on the shop, tag, and category pages of your WooCommerce store.

Step 5: Apply the bulk discount rule to desired user roles

1. Now, you can choose which user roles to apply the discount to. For example, if you run a hybrid wholesale and retail store, you can choose to apply the discount only for customers registered as "Wholesale" users in WordPress. All other customers won't be able to apply the discount to their orders.
2. If you selected "Only to specific users" or "Only to specific user roles" in the previous step, add details of the users or user roles you want to include.
3. Toggle on the "Exclude users from this discount" option to exclude specific users from applying this discount.
4. Enter the specific details of the users you want excluded, if you selected the previous option.
5. Choose whether to manually activate and deactivate the rule or schedule its start and end times in the "Schedule rule" section.
6. Enable the "Disable this rule for "on-sale" products button if you want to prevent this discount from being applied to products that are already on sale in your store.
7. Toggle on the "Disable other rules with lower priority" button to prevent other rules with a lower priority from being applied to the same discounted products.
8. Enable the "Disable when a coupon has been applied" button to disable this rule from being applied for orders where customers have used coupons.
9. You can add custom messages to products for which the discount and quantity rule applies. There are lots of formatting options, so feel free to use a different color or font size to highlight your text.
10. Finally, click on the "Save Rule" button.

And that's it! You've successfully added the bulk discount feature to your WooCommerce store. Here's a snapshot of how it looks on the front end view of a WooCommerce website:

It's time to set up WooCommerce bulk discounts on your website!

As we've just seen, bulk discounts can work for any type of WooCommerce store. With bulk discounts, customers get to save more when they buy more, which increases their satisfaction with your business. Also, store owners benefit from the increase in revenue and better inventory management.

There are various bulk discount plugins to choose from. However, YITH WooCommerce dynamic pricing and discounts is the best option for most eCommerce stores. 

YITH WooCommerce dynamic pricing and discounts is an all-in-one discounts plugin that lets you add various types of bulk discount rules and offers to your WooCommerce store with just a few simple clicks. 

This plugin also lets you create multiple types of discounts in addition to bulk discounts. For example, buy X get Y free deals, buy one get one free (BOGO), cart discounts, free products, pricing deals, special offers, and much more. This makes it the perfect choice for your WooCommerce store.