WooCommerce: give a discount for a higher quantity

Finding the right pricing strategy is important if you want to increase your store’s Average Order Value. An easy strategy for your WooCommerce store is to offer a discount for a higher quantity. The idea is simple: when your customer buys more than 1 item, you give them a discount. This is often called a “bulk discount” or “quantity-based” discount..

There are a bunch of plugins available for WooCommerce that make it easy to set up discounts for a higher quantity. One of these plugins is called WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches and is an excellent choice to enhance your store with a wide array of quantity related features.

This complete tutorial will explain how to set up quantity discounts by using that plugin. Let’s dive in!

Example of discounts for a higher quantity

Before we dive into the tutorial part of this guide, let’s make sure we’re on the same page. Put simply: this pricing strategy means you reduce the cost (unit price) of your product when your customer orders a higher quantity of the same item. This tactic is also often called “bulk discounts” or “tiered pricing”. Here’s a simple example:

• Buy 1 item at $10.
• Buy 3 items at $8 each, which is a discount of $2 per item ($6 total discount).
• Buy 5 or more items at $6 each, giving a $4 discount per item.

By using this simple strategy, you can encourage customers to purchase more without having to introduce new products or services. This simple tactic helps increase sales and revenue for your store so it is a no-brainer to implement.

What are the advantages of quantity discounts?

As mentioned earlier in this article, the biggest advantage of offering quantity discounts is that it increases your average order value (which means a higher profit margin for you). But there are some other less-obvious advantages too:

• No need for excessive warehouse storage if you are selling physical products. If you sell a higher quantity of your items on average, you do not need to store them in your warehouse. This means you can make due with a smaller warehouse.
• You get a competitive advantage because you offer your customers a better deal than your competition, even if it’s the same product.
• You attract a new type of customer: the deal hunter. They are interested in good deals and can not pass up an opportunity.

Setting up WooCommerce to offer a discount for a higher quantity

In this section, we’ll look at setting up WooCommerce to offer quantity discounts.

Your first instinct might be to look into WooCommerce coupons to build this feature. Unfortunately, coupon codes are not the correct way to do this because:

• They require the user to input them manually at checkout.
• They do not offer a way to set specific discounts based on the quantity the user wants.

The easiest way to get started is by using the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin to create quantity discounts in WooCommerce. This plugin has everything built-in to setup this simple growth strategy. It also contains some other features that complement this well:

• You can add rules to limit the accepted quantity of a product. You have the option to set a minimum or maximum allowable quantity, and you can even to set the allowed quantity increment (customers can only order items per 4, for example).
• You can replace the boring WooCommerce quantity input field with visually appealing quantity swatches. This feature enables you to further entice customers to purchase items in bulk by using elegantly designed clickable swatches.

Step 1: install the plugin

Before you begin, you must first buy the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin from the Wombat Plugins store. This plugin is a robust tool for all quantity-based functionality.

Once installed and activated, we can move onto the next step.

Step 2: set up quantity discounts for your WooCommerce products

Discounts can be configured for a single product by accessing the “edit product” screen, or for multiple products at once by using the “product categories” screen. In this tutorial, we will use the Edit Product screen.

Go to Products → All Products and edit your product you want by hovering over it and clicking Edit.

Now find the General tab in the Product Data box.

Remember how we said that offering a quantity discount is also often called “tiered pricing”? This is the terminology we chose to use in the plugin too. In the above screenshot, take note of the Tiers and Tiered pricing type settings. This is where the magic happens!

• Tiered Pricing Type: here, you can define how you want to set up your discounts. Either via a fixed product price or a percentage discount.
• Tiers: here, you define the actual discounts. You can set the minimum quantity the customer has to purchase to get this discount. Then,  you can also set the new product price or percentage discount.

Let’s use the tiered pricing example from earlier:

• Buy 1 item at $10.
• Buy 3 items at $8 each.
• Buy 5 or more items at $6 each.

Then this would be your configuration:

The first tier (for 1 item) is the product’s general price. The other 2 configurations are defined in the Tiers section.

When you are done, publish or update your WooCommerce product.

Step 3: display the discounts on your WooCommerce product

Now that the discounts are defined in WooCommerce, we have to display them to the customer so they know they can receive a discount by buying more items.

There are 2 ways to display discounts to users:

Display a discount table

Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Quantity Manager and enable Show Pricing Table. You can select where to show the table and you can further define the table’s columns and titles:

All products with a quantity discount will show a handy table on the product page:

The plugin does not add any styling to this table so it will take over the styling from your theme and fit well within your site’s design.

Display swatches

Another way to show your customers they can get a discount is by creating quantity swatches. They are clickable boxes that will replace the default WooCommerce quantity input box. You are free to define the content of these boxes, but we encourage you to show your customers they can get a good deal. Here is an example:

You have a few design options and you can define the colors and text freely. You can easily create something like this too:

If you’re interested in adding these to your site, please check out our in-depth tutorial on how to create quantity swatches for your WooCommerce products.

WooCommerce makes it easy to give discounts for higher quantities

Any store can benefit from bulk quantity discounts. It is such an easy way to increase your profits and make customers happy.

The most powerful way to create such a discount structure is by using the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin. It’s fast, easy, and comes with additional powerful features to increase your profit margins even further.

In this guide, we’ve shown you how you can use WooCommerce to give discounts for higher quantities in just under 10 minutes!