The power of a well-placed discount in influencing a buyer’s decision cannot be overstated. A whopping 177.9 million consumers – which account for 68.2% of all US adults – took advantage of digital discounts in 2022.
Offering discounts is a foundational aspect of running a successful e-commerce business. In the context of online stores, a discount is more than just a price reduction.
It serves as:
- An enticing opportunity for potential customers.
- A strategic tool to transform uncertain visitors into satisfied consumers.
- Ultimately, a method to boost sales.
In this guide, we’ll provide you with practical knowledge and tools to successfully implement discount strategies that draw in customers and boost sales.
Although WooCommerce comes equipped with some built-in discount capabilities, plugins like WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules, and Swatches (WQDRS) significantly extend its functionality. Plugins offer a multitude of options for creating and managing discounts.
Are you ready to revolutionize your discount strategy? Let’s dive in!
Introduction to discounts in WooCommerce
Making smart use of discounts can greatly heighten your marketing strategy and contribute significantly to your bottom line. WooCommerce allows you to apply 3 core types of discounts using coupon codes:
- Percentage discounts: Offering a percentage reduction on the total shopping cart, these discounts are a favorite among retailers and customers alike. A classic “15% off” deal, for instance, can successfully entice customers to make a purchase they’ve been considering for a while.
- Fixed cart discounts: This type of discount applies a fixed sum reduction to the total cost of all items in a customer’s virtual shopping cart. A neat “Save $10 on your purchase” deal can nudge shoppers to complete their transactions.
- Fixed product discounts: With this discount, a fixed sum is deducted from specific products, calculated per item. For example, a “Get $5 off on every pair of shoes” discount falls into this category.
Discount strategies can take various forms to align with your unique business needs. They range from sporadic percentage-based reductions and consistent fixed cart discounts to time-restricted seasonal promotions and exclusive member deals.
While WooCommerce comes with built-in functionalities for these basic discount setups, additional plugins and tools can be extremely beneficial for those who want to fully leverage advanced discount strategies. Plugins unlock a world of advanced and diverse discount possibilities for enhancing your WooCommerce store.
Exploring different types of discounts
When you understand the broad array of discounts available for your WooCommerce store, you can craft and execute a discount strategy best suited to your business objectives.
Let’s dive into various types of discounts and how they can bring value to your brand and your customers:
- Percentage discounts: This is a straightforward discounting method where the original price is reduced by a percentage, such as 10% or 20% off. Whether it’s implemented storewide or on specified products, this type of discount can invigorate sales without significantly undercutting profitability. You can effectively deploy these discounts with tools like WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules, and Swatches to attract more customers to your store.
- Quantity discounts: Quantity discounts can be a forceful tool for incentivizing bulk purchases, offering incremental discounts based on the quantity purchased. This advances your sales volume, and with WQDRS, implementing this discount model is frictionless.
- Bulk discounts: These are similar to quantity discounts, as they reward customers who purchase large quantities. WQDRS effortlessly facilitates this discount setup, helping you streamline your sales process and better serve your customers who make large purchases.
- Fixed amount discounts: Offering a set discount, such as $5 off, offers a lucrative opportunity for customers making small purchases. This strategy appeals to bargain seekers and can increase your store’s transaction frequency.
- Seasonal discounts: Applying discounts during festive seasons, holidays, or specific times of the year is an impactful way to turbocharge sales and transition seasonal shoppers into year-round customers.
- First-time buyer discounts: A straightforward “10% off on your first order” could persuade website visitors to make that all-important first purchase. This gesture of appreciation makes them feel valued and might lead to an instant conversion.
- Loyalty discounts: Rewarding repeat customers or members with exclusive discounts nurtures stronger relationships and bolsters customer retention rates.
- Buy One, Get One Free Discounts: Commonly known as BOGO, this strategy serves a dual purpose – it helps to clear out inventory while making customers feel they’ve received a great deal.
WQDRS is excellent for implementing percentage, quantity, and bulk discounts, but you might want to consider additional plugins like Discount Rules for WooCommerce – PRO for a broader range of discount types.
Introducing WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches (WQDRS)
If you’re looking to efficiently manage discounts for your online store, WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches is an excellent plugin that will help you do just that.
The plugin’s versatile features let you set minimum and maximum order quantities with ease. You can also modify how quantities are calculated on a product page. Moreover, it gives you total control over your pricing, particularly for items ordered in bulk.
Let’s take a detailed look at some of its unique features:
- Create quantity-based discounts: This feature allows store owners to set up discounts that increase as the quantity of the purchased product increases, encouraging customers to buy in larger quantities.
- Set up discount rules: Create flexible discount rules based on various criteria. Whether you want to provide discounts to specific user roles, during certain times, or based on product categories, this feature makes it happen.
- Replace default quantity box with clickable swatches: WQDRS allows you to replace the traditional quantity box with visually appealing clickable swatches.
- Specify minimum and maximum quantities: By setting minimum and maximum quantities for purchases, you can manage stock more effectively. This feature particularly benefits wholesalers or sellers of items typically bought in bulk.
- Add interval-based quantities and multiples: With WQDRS you can define quantities based on intervals or multiples – a highly useful feature when selling items in standard packages or batches.
WQDRS is a fantastic tool for implementing discounts, enhancing your WooCommerce store’s appeal, increasing customer traffic, and boosting profitability.
A step-by-step guide to adding discounts in WooCommerce
Adding discounts to your WooCommerce store can be challenging, especially when you’re unsure how to effectively implement it. However, the process doesn’t have to be daunting.
Here’s how it works.
Setting up percentage discounts
Implementing a percentage discount that applies a predetermined percentage reduction to the entire cart is straightforward with WQDRS.
- Head to the specific WooCommerce product for which you want to set up a percentage discount.
- Scroll to its metabox at the bottom of the screen.
- Go to General → Tiered pricing.
- Select Percentage from the dropdown menu.
- You can add tiers for the percentage discount offered. For instance, purchasing 10 products could entail a 10% discount. Purchasing 20 could entail a 30% discount, and so on.
- Save your changes to apply the discount rules.
Your defined percentage discount is ready to trigger once a shopper adds the specified number of items to their cart. If you want to customize how the discount options appear at the frontend, take a look at this detailed guide on customizing percentage discounts using WQDRS.
Implementing quantity discounts
Quantity discounts are much-loved sales incentives, offering price advantages when customers buy in larger volumes. Here’s how to configure the quantity discount type in WQDRS.
- Navigate to the product for which you want to set up a quantity-based discount.
- Scroll down to the Product data box.
- Set the Regular price of the product, e.g. $50.
- Choose Fixed price from the Tiered pricing dropdown menu.
- Next, we will have to set up the quantity-based tiers for which a discounted price per product will be applied. For example, if the customer buys 5 quantities of the product, they might get each product for $45, which is an effective discount of $5 per product. Add all such relevant tiers.
- To display the pricing table, go to WooCommerce → Settings → Quantity Manager. Enable the Show the tiered pricing table on the product page setting.
Now, whenever your shoppers buy within the defined quantity range, WQDRS automatically applies the discount.
Applying bulk discounts
Bulk discounts serve as key incentives for customers to purchase more items, compared to regular discounts. Here’s how to enable these for variable products with WQDRS.
- Go to the variable product you want to edit.
- Scroll down to the Product data section.
- Select the variation for which you want to offer a bulk discount.
- Set the Regular price and pricing tiers for the variation. You can choose to have either a fixed amount or a percentage discount for bulk purchases. You can also set the minimum and maximum number of products the customer can purchase for the variation.
- Save your changes and view the product at the frontend. The tiered pricing table should be visible for the selected variation.
- Once the product is added to the cart, the price should change automatically based on the quantity of the products added.
This way, once the value boundaries are set up, the plugin effectively cuts down a chunk of the total cart price when a customer’s cart falls within the discount rules.
Adding other types of discounts in WooCommerce
If the discount variety offered by WQDRS has piqued your curiosity, and you’d like to explore an even broader spectrum of discount strategies, we have some good news for you. For a truly extensive range of discount possibilities, we’d recommend using the dedicated Discount Rules for WooCommerce PRO plugin.
This powerful tool gives your WooCommerce discount capabilities a significant boost, and it flawlessly integrates with other crucial product plugins, such as Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce!
This plugin offers various discount types to truly customize your customers’ buying experience. Here’s a sneak peek of just some of the diverse discount types you can implement with this plugin:
- Tiered discounts
- Product-specific discounts
- Category-wide discounts
- User role-based discounts
- “Buy One, Get One Free” offers
- Free product offer when order total exceeds a certain amount
- Conditional discounts
- Discounts for product variations
- Product attributes-based discounts
- Purchase history-based discounts
- Cart subtotal-based discounts
- Delivery address-based discounts
- Next order discounts
- First order discounts
- Coupon-activated discounts
- Discounts for customers with specific domains
- Multiple discount rules application in a purchase
These options let you finetune your WooCommerce store’s discount strategy, so you can experiment with, adapt, and evolve your approach.
Let’s take a look at how some types of discounts can significantly benefit your WooCommerce store:
- Tiered discounts: An excellent strategy to encourage customers to buy more. By setting up different discount levels based on the quantity of purchases, you motivate customers to increase their cart size. An increase in purchase quantity translates to higher discounts, hence bigger savings!
- Conditional discounts: Providing discounts based on specific conditions aids in crafting targeted discounts, inciting particular consumer behaviors. For example, offering a discount when the cart value exceeds a set amount is a powerful incentive for customers to add more products to their cart.
- Next order discounts: A brilliant technique for customer retention, this tactic encourages repeat purchases by extending discounts on subsequent orders. Think of it as your store’s special way of saying “Thank you! We’d love to have you shop with us again”.
- Product attributes-based discounts: This strategy allows you to extend discounts on specific product attributes such as a distinct color or size. Perhaps you’re trying to clear out your stock of less popular items. This approach might be just the ticket.
Incorporating an exhaustive discount plugin such as Discount Rules for WooCommerce into your toolbox can significantly expand your strategy landscape, making your online store a favorite hub for customers seeking great deals.
Best practices for implementing WooCommerce discounts
While the idea of using versatile discount plugins sounds great, effectively implementing discounts without jeopardizing profit margins or brand value is a balancing act. Let’s look at some of the best practices for implementing WooCommerce discounts, which ensure that merchants can optimize sales and enhance customer satisfaction while maintaining the integrity of their brand.
Have a well-planned discount strategy
Implementing discounts requires thoughtful strategic planning. Without a well-thought-out strategy, business owners run the risk of damaging their reputation, profitability, and long-term success.
Haphazardly applied discounts may inadvertently dent not just your bottom line, but also your brand’s trustworthiness.
Do not overuse discounts
When you offer frequent discounts, you can unintentionally devalue your products and tarnish your brand’s reputation. Therefore, the quantity and frequency of discounts need careful calibration. This strategic balancing act between attracting customers and maintaining profitability is a cornerstone for the successful journey of your e-commerce business.
A tactical solution to maintain this balance? Time-restricted discounts and flash sales. These strategies motivate immediate purchasing decisions by playing on people’s fear of missing out, thereby turning potential customers into actual ones.
Maintain clear communication at all times
It’s important that you maintain clear communication about discounts to customers. This extends from on-site notifications, ensuring anyone browsing your site learns of the deals available, to broader outreach through email marketing campaigns or social media promotions.
Review and monitor your discount strategy at periodic intervals
This is necessary to ensure your approach effectively boosts sales while maintaining product value and brand reputation, and it needs to be part of your regular business practices. Your strategy should evolve based on these analyses, shaping a more prosperous path for your WooCommerce store.
Boost your sales with effective WooCommerce discounts
When thoughtfully implemented, discounts can be a powerful tool in e-commerce, known for their effectiveness in attracting customers, boosting sales, and reinforcing customer loyalty. In the fast-paced digital marketplace, choosing the right discount strategy tailored to your business model and customer base can give your online store the competitive edge it needs.
Throughout this article, we have explored various types of discounts – bulk, percentage-based, quantity discounts, and more. Each brings its own unique advantages to the table and plays a pivotal role in driving your e-commerce success.
By leveraging tools like the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules, & Swatches plugin, adding and managing a vast array of discounts becomes a seamless process – so get started today!
