Master the art of setting up WooCommerce quantity discounts
Quantity discounts encourage customers to purchase more products. The result? Increased customer loyalty and more revenue for your online store. Find out how to set up WooCommerce quantity discount offers and promote them for maximum revenue.
Searching for a way to set up quantity discounts in your online store? In this detailed guide, we'll discuss everything you need to know about offering WooCommerce quantity discounts.
Here's an overview of what we'll cover:
- How quantity discounts work.
- Types of quantity discount offers.
- Top plugins to implement WooCommerce quantity discounts.
- Best strategies for implementing quantity discounts in WooCommerce.
WooCommerce doesn't offer built-in quantity discounts but you can easily add them to your store with the help of a plugin.
In a hurry and want to add quantity discounts to your store right away? Get started with our top pick, WooCommerce Discount Manager. This an all-in-one discount plugin enables you to create various types of quantity discount offers, such as volume discounts, tiered pricing, buy x get y free deals, and more. It's packed with tons of helpful features like discount scheduling, prioritization, and promotional notices to boost your revenue even further.
Let's begin with a quick overview of what quantity discounts are, different types of quantity discounts, and their benefits for ecommerce stores of all sizes.
What are WooCommerce quantity based discounts?
WooCommerce quantity discounts work by offering customers a lower price when they buy multiple units of the same product or reach a certain order value.
Quantity based pricing is a powerful pricing strategy which encourages customers to buy more products in a single order. They do this because the price per unit decreases as the number of items increases. For example, a clothing store might offer a 10% discount when a customer buys 3 shirts, or a 15% discount when they buy 5 or more.
Types of WooCommerce quantity discounts
WooCommerce quantity discounts come in various flavors. Here are the most common types used across various store niches:
- Volume discounts: Bulk volume discounts are straightforward percentage or flat rate discounts based on the quantity of a single product purchased. The more items a customer buys, the bigger the discount. For example, you might offer a 10% discount for orders over 100 units or a "Buy 10 products for a $2 discount" offer.
- Tiered pricing: With tiered pricing, you apply different prices based on quantity ranges. Unlike volume discounts that offer a fixed percentage or amount off, tiered pricing sets specific prices for each tier. For instance, a stationery store might price pens at $2 each for 1-10 units, $1.75 each for 11-20 units, and $1.50 each for 21+ units.
- Bundle discounts: Bundle discounts offer savings when customers buy a pre-defined set of products together. This works well for complementary items. For example, an electronics store can bundle multiple accessories like keyboard, mouse, and mousepad and offer them at a discount. This not only increases order value but also helps move multiple product lines.
- Buy X get Y free: Buy X get Y free promotions offer customers free items when they purchase a certain quantity. There are many ways to offer this in your ecommerce store, the most common are: buy one get one free (BOGO), buy two get one free, buy two get two free... and so on.
- Role-based discounts: Role-based discount offers provide special bulk pricing based on the customer's role or group in your WooCommerce store. For instance, if you run a hybrid wholesale and retail store, you can offer different discount levels for retail customers, wholesale buyers, or VIP wholesale buyers.
Why should I offer a WooCommerce quantity discount?
Offering quantity discounts in your WooCommerce store is a powerful marketing strategy with tons of benefits, including:
- Higher average order value: When customers see they can save money by buying more, they often do. For example, if you sell t-shirts and offer a 10% discount on orders of 3 or more, customers who initially planned to buy just one might decide to get three instead. As customers buy in larger quantities, your average order value goes up. This boosts sales and increases the revenue per transaction.
- Quicker inventory turnover: Quantity discounts encourage customers to buy more products at once, which helps you sell more units in less time. This faster stock turnover reduces storage costs and frees up capital for new inventory.
- Enhanced customer loyalty: Offering better prices for bulk purchases makes customers less likely to shop around for alternatives and can encourage them to return to your store for future orders.
- Increased profit margins: Selling larger quantities per order reduces per-unit costs for packaging, shipping, and order fulfillment. For instance, if you sell phone cases and offer a discount on orders of 5 or more, you'll spend less on individual packaging and can ship all items in one box. This cuts down on packing, shipping, and handling costs.
5 popular plugins for WooCommerce quantity discounts
1. WooCommerce Discount Manager
WooCommerce Discount Manager is the best plugin for quantity discounts. It lets you set up all types of quantity discounts including, volume discounts, bundle deals, buy x get y free offers, and user role-based discounts.
It works on all product types, whether simple products, product variations, or composite products. To help you save time, it lets you create unlimited quantity discount rules with varying degrees of targeting:
- Storewide: This applies the quantity discount rule to all products in your store's catalog.
- Product categories: This applies the quantity discount rule to specific product categories.
- Individual products: This applies the quantity discount rule to individual products.
For each product targeting option you select, you can set up exclusions to preclude specific products or categories from the discount.
That's not all. This quantity discount plugin offers numerous added features to improve your site shopping experience.
For example:
- It auto-applies the quantity discount to eligible shopping carts — customers won't have to manually enter the coupon code on the checkout page and can place their orders quickly.
- It includes a scheduling option so you can enter start and end dates ahead of time for the periods when the discounts will be active. This lets you set up and test quantity discount rules and conditions well in advance.
- It lets you add banners with custom copy and design to prominent locations on the product detail page as well as in the cart.
- You can set the discount priority rules to dictate which rule applies in scenarios where more than one discount rule applies to the same product.
WooCommerce Discount Manager is an all-in-one dynamic pricing and discount plugin, so in addition to quantity discounts, it also enables you to create other types of discount offers, including fixed amount and percentage discounts, cart discounts, flash sales, and more.
Plus, it pairs well with other Barn2 plugins. For example, use it with WooCommerce Product Table to create quick order form complete with information about the quantity discounts.
Many customers love this plugin and have shared positive feedback on its functionality and support. It also comes with prompt, friendly, and helpful customer support if you need a hand.
WooCommerce Discount Manager pricing: Premium plugin. Choose from a range of licenses based on the number of sites required and whether you wish to pay for lifetime access or annually. It's available individually or in a discounted bundle with WooCommerce Product Table. Either way, your purchase is backed by a 30-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.
2. YITH WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts
Another popular premium WooCommerce plugin by YITH, WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts offers an intuitive user interface from which you can create and manage a wide variety of discount types, including quantity discounts.
It offers advanced product targeting options, so you can set up discount rules for all products, specific product categories, or individual products in your store.
Here are some of its top features:
- It lets you offer a wide range of quantity discount types, including buy x get y, tiered pricing, bulk quantity discounts, and more.
- You can set user-level conditions to restrict which customers and customer groups can access the quantity discounts.
- It lets you choose whether to restrict customers to one discount per purchase or allow them to combine multiple discounts for each order.
- You can display dynamic notices on the product detail and cart pages to nudge customers to complete specific actions, such as updating the item quantity in their shopping carts to qualify for free shipping.
YITH WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts pricing: Premium plugin for $149.99 per year. Your purchase is backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee.
WooCommerce Quantity Based Discounts & Pricing
If you're looking for an extension that specializes in quantity discounts, then you might want to check out Plugify's WooCommerce Quantity Based Discounts & Pricing plugin.
Here are some of its top features:
- There are three different discount types to choose from: flat rate, fixed percentage, and tiered pricing.
- It lets you add discount targeting rules storewide, to specific categories, individual products, and variable products. You can add targeting rules for specific user roles.
- You can add the tiered pricing table to various locations on product detail pages: before the product summary, before the add to cart button, or after the add to cart button.
- You can customize the backgrounds and colors of the discount table in line with your brand.
Overall, WooCommerce Quantity Based Discounts & Pricing is a pretty simple but solid plugin choice if your discount strategy wholly focuses on quantity discounts.
WooCommerce Quantity Based Discounts & Pricing price: Premium plugin for $49 per year. Your purchase is backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Flycart's Discount Rules for WooCommerce
Discount Rules for WooCommerce is another popular plugin by Flycart. It lets store owners provide various types of quantity discounts, including bulk discounts, tiered pricing, buy one get one free offers, etc.
While there is a free version with basic features, you need the premium version of this plugin to access quantity discounts.
Here are some of Discount Rules for WooCommerce's top features:
- It lets you set up discount targeting rules to apply the quantity discount to entire product categories as well as individual products.
- You can choose to let customers apply the same quantity discount pricing rule to a single product or multiple products.
- It lets you add user role restrictions that control which customer group can access the quantity discount offer.
- Apart from quantity discounts, you can also create discounts based on the cart total value, such as a “Spend at least $120 and get 10% off”.
One unique feature this plugin offers is that it allows you to restrict who can access discounts based on user behavior, such as the number of times a customer has ordered from your store, whether they have previously bought a specific product and others.
WooCommerce Quantity Based Discounts & Pricing price: Premium plugin for $79 per year. Your purchase is backed by a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Addify's WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing and Discounts
WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing and Discounts is a freemium plugin available via Addify's website and the WooCommerce marketplace. Like some other plugins on this list, it lets you do more than offer quantity-based discounts.
Here are some of Discount Rules for WooCommerce's key features:
- It lets you offer a wide range of quantity discounts, such as quantity-based tiered pricing, buy one get one free offers, volume discounts, etc.
- You can also offer other types of product discounts like simple fixed discounts, cart subtotal discounts, discounts based on total spend, etc.
- You can add multiple rules and conditions to apply discounts on a per-product, cart level, or user role basis.
- You can choose whether to apply the discount amount on regular product prices as well as to products that are already on sale.
- It lets you prioritize which discount rules to be applied to purchases.
- It includes the scheduling option to offer discounts for specific date ranges.
WooCommerce Quantity Based Discounts & Pricing price: Premium plugin for $99 per year. Your purchase is backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee.
How to create quantity based discounts for your WooCommerce store?
In this section, I'll walk you through the steps to set up quantity discounts with the WooCommerce Discount Manager plugin.
For this tutorial, I'll create the buy one get one free discount type.
1: Set up your discount rule
- Install the WooCommerce Discount Manager plugin on your store.
- In your WordPress admin dashboard, go to Marketing → Discounts.
- Click the "Add New" button.
- From the options in the pop-up menu, choose "Free products" and hit "Create".
- Give your offer a clear name (you'll be the only one seeing this).
- "Which products?" - Decide which items qualify for your offer. You can include all products or pick specific ones. If you select "Selected categories" or "Selected products," you'll need to choose the exact items for the discount.
2: Add discount rules and conditions
- "Number of paid products required"- Set the minimum quantity purchase requirement a customer must meet to get the deal. For this tutorial, I'll type "1" as I'm creating a BOGO deal.
- "Number of free products given" - Specify the quantity of products you'll give away for free. For this tutorial, I'll type "1" here too.
- "How should the discount be applied?" - Choose whether the freebie must be identical to the paid product or if it can be any eligible item you specified earlier.
- "Applies to" - Specify which customer groups can use this deal: all customers, specific customer groups, or individual users.
- "Availability" - Decide how long your offer runs. Set it to last indefinitely or update the start and end date ranges.
- "Product page content" - Add custom marketing copy to highlight the deal on product detail pages. Use text, images, shortcodes, or HTML. This can be something as simple as: "Mega Sale: Buy any shirt, get another FREE! No code needed."
- "Content location" - To choose the message placement, pick from six locations on the product page to display your promotional message.
- "Cart notice" - Add another custom note for the cart page to remind customers about the offer. Again, keep things simple, for instance: "Great choice! We've applied your Buy One, Get One Free deal to your order."
Finally, click "Save" to finish setting up the discount. Note that it will be active based on the dates entered in the "Availability" field.
3: Set up discount priorities
Many online stores often run several quantity based promotions at once. This leads to situations where some customers qualify for multiple deals and some products are eligible for several discounts at the same time.
To handle this, you can use WooCommerce Discount Manager to set discount priorities and ensure only the highest-priority discount applies per order.
Here's how to set up your discount hierarchy:
- In your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Marketing → Discounts. Here, you'll see all discount rules added to your store.
- Use the drag-and-drop feature to order discounts by priority.
That's all! Before launching to real customers, go to your store's front end, add eligible products to your cart, and test the checkout flow to make sure that the discounts work as you intend.
Best strategies for implementing quantity discounts in WooCommerce
These tips will help you successfully implement quantity discount offers in your WooCommerce store. Think of them like a checklist to ensure that everything runs smoothly.
Schedule promotions beforehand
Plan and set up quantity discount campaigns well in advance to give you time to configure the rules and discount conditions and test everything properly. If you're an established store, you can easily align quantity discount campaigns with your overall marketing calendar.
Pro tip: Use WooCommerce Discount Manager's 'Availability' option to add start and end dates to schedule each discount offer.
Promote the discount offers
Avoid complex rules that might confuse customers and clearly communicate discount structures in a way that's easy to understand. Make sure you use clear marketing copy on product detail pages, category pages, and wherever else you're promoting the discount campaign.
Set realistic thresholds
Choose quantity thresholds that make sense for your products and target audience. For example, if you sell high-ticket items like furniture, a "buy 3 get 1 free" offer might be unrealistic. Instead, you might want to offer 1 item at full price and give a percentage discount on the second item. For lower-priced items like t-shirts or socks, higher quantity thresholds usually work well. The key here is to encourage bulk buying without setting the bar so high that it deters purchases.
Monitor and refine
Use tools like WooCommerce Analytics or Google Analytics to regularly analyze the performance of your quantity discount campaigns. Make sure to track key metrics like average order value, total revenue, and profit margins, and be prepared to adjust if a campaign isn't performing as well as expected. You might need to tweak discount rates, modify quantity thresholds, update the promotional copy, or even change which products are included in the offer.
Combine with other marketing strategies
Quantity discounts work best when they're properly integrated with other promotional tactics. For example, you can combine quantity discounts with limited-time offers aka flash sales to create a sense of urgency. Fit quantity discounts into your marketing strategy to reap the full benefits.
Boost sales with WooCommerce quantity discounts!
Many stores use quantity-based offers to get rid of slow-moving stock, boost customer loyalty, and increase sales.
In this post, I've shared my pick of the best WooCommerce quantity discount plugins. As we've seen, WooCommerce Discount Manager is the best of the best. This comprehensive discount and dynamic pricing plugin lets you set up various types of quantity discount offers. You can create volume discounts, tiered pricing, buy x get y free deals, and more. It's packed with tons of helpful, built-in features like discount scheduling, discount prioritization, promotional notices, and more that boost your store's user experience (UX) and overall revenue.
WooCommerce Discount Manager also gives you more bang for your buck, as it lets you create other types of discounts, including flat rate discounts, percentage discounts, cart discounts, etc.
Get started today and set up your first quantity discount offer in minutes!