If your website is receiving a high volume of traffic and orders, it may be beneficial to limit the quantity of WooCommerce products customers can purchase on your store. This can help you better manage your inventory and profit margins.
You can set minimum or maximum quantities to prevent overstocking or encourage larger orders, depending on your business goals. Out of the box, WooCommerce allows customers to order any quantity of any product on your site. Fortunately, you can use a WooCommerce plugin to set quantity rules for your visitors.
In this tutorial, we’ll cover everything you need to know about WooCommerce quantity limits. We’ll introduce you to the best plugin to set a minimum or maximum allowed quantity (and more) in WooCommerce.
Examples of quantity limits
Before we begin, let’s take a look at some real-life examples of quantity limits. This will give you an idea of how popular brands implement their requirements.
Maximum quantity example
Walmart restricts the maximum quantity of popular items to limit customer frustration. Due to the store’s busy nature, customers may get angry when items are consistently out of stock. Implementing a maximum allowed quantity helps ensure that a single customer is not able to purchase a significant portion of the stock, leaving none for others.
Minimum quantity example
Stickermule requires a minimum of 50 stickers per print, otherwise the printing process is too costly and they would not make a profit. Imagine firing up an industrial printer just to print one sticker.
Advantages of limiting order quantity in WooCommerce
If you’re selling physical products, defining quantity limits throughout your store can have a couple of advantages:
- Increase customer satisfaction. Implementing a maximum allowed quantity helps prevent products from running out of stock too quickly and ensures there is enough for all customers. On the other hand, offering bulk pricing discounts in combination with a minimum allowed quantity can create a win-win situation for both you and your customers. You are able to sell more items, and your customer will get a discount on their purchase.
- Reduce manufacturing costs. Products that are produced on demand often benefit from the economy of scale, which makes them less expensive to manufacture. Enforcing a minimum quantity helps ensure that the production process is financially viable.
- Not exceeding warehouse capacity. By disallowing your customers from purchasing large orders, you can stay within the limits of your warehouse capacity.
- Lower packaging costs. Some products are cheaper when they are packaged in a certain way or quantity. You can enforce the exact quantity by setting both a minimum and a maximum.
- Keep everything manageable during high-peak periods. Christmas time is traditionally a busy period for e-commerce stores. By limiting quantities throughout your store, you can protect yourself against those busy periods and make sure you can fulfil every order.
There are a lot more advantages specific to each business, but we don’t want to dive in too deep. If you’re here to read a step-by-step tutorial on how to do implement quantity rules in WooCommerce, read on!
Setting up quantity limits in WooCommerce
In this section, we’ll look at how to set up various quantity limits in your WooCommerce store. It’s easier than it sounds!
By default, WooCommerce allows you to input any quantity greater than zero when placing an order. The only limit that WooCommerce imposes is the available stock, which is only relevant when stock control is enabled for a particular product.
This is why you’ll need a plugin to enforce quantity limits in WooCommerce. The easiest way to get started is by using the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin. This plugin helps you to increase your store’s profits by improving various quantity features of WooCommerce. Take a look at some of its features:
- Product quantity control. Set a minimum or maximum allowed quantity per product. You can also set a custom default quantity for each product.
- Quantity increments. Quantity increments are intervals or step values that allow customers to order products in a specific quantity only. For example, you can restrict customers to only order products in multiples of 10 (10, 100, 1000, …). You can take this a step further and create advanced intervals. For example, you can make sure customers can only order 1, 2, 5, or 10 items. Once above 10, they can only order in increments of 50. Other quantities won’t be allowed.
- Manage limits at multiple levels. You can define quantity limits per product or per category, defining them for multiple products at once.
- Quantity discounts. You can offer bulk discounts for customers ordering a higher quantity. These work extremely well in combination with a minimum quantity limit.
- Quantity selectors. You can redesign the boring quantity input field into a quantity selector that makes more sense for your business.
The plugin offers these features wile remaining lightweight and does not impact your site speed.
The simplest way to add quantity rules to your WooCommerce products.
Find out moreThe rest of this tutorial will explain exactly how to define quantity rules for your WooCommerce products.
Step 1: install the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin
Before we can dive into the real work, you have to get your copy of the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin from the Wombat Plugins store. This plugin is a real powerhouse for all quantity-related features!
Once you’ve purchased the plugin, follow these steps to install and activate it:
- Download the ZIP file from your Wombat Account.
- On your WordPress site, navigate to WooCommerce → Settings → Quantity Manager and enter your license key.
- Click on the Activate button and then Save changes.
Step 2: set up quantity rules on your WooCommerce product
Next, we’ll add a minimum and maximum required quantity to a specific product. To do this, go to Products → All Products and click Edit under the product you want to add quantity rules to.
Simple products
Next, scroll down and go to the Quantity Options tab in the Product data section. Here, you can enter the different quantity rules for your product:
Let’s go over the relevant settings:
- Minimum quantity: customers have to order at least this many items of your product.
- Maximum quantity: customers can order at most this many items of your product. They cannot order if their cart exceeds this amount.
- Default quantity: the default selected quantity for this product. If this setting is omitted, it defaults to 1.
- Step interval: you can define the step between allowed quantities. For example, you can define the product can only be bought in multiples of 5 (allowed are 5, 10, 15, 20, etc.).
Variable products
To set a quantity limit on any of the different variations of a variable product, go to the Variations tab and open the variation you want. There, you’ll find the same settings as on a simple product:
When you are finished, don’t forget to update your product to apply the settings. That’s how easy it is to control quantity on the WooCommerce product level!
Optional: define quantity rules on product categories
To avoid the hassle of setting quantity limits for each individual product, you can define them once at the product category level. This way, all products within the category will automatically follow the same quantity rules.
To set quantity limits for an entire WooCommerce product category, navigate to Products → Categories and click Edit under the product you want to add quantity rules to. Scroll down to the relevant settings:
Wrapping up the best way to limit product quantity in WooCommerce
Out of the box, WooCommerce allows customers to order any quantity of a product that is available in the store (until it is out of stock). This can be problematic for your business because it may make it difficult to control the manufacturing process or manage inventory space.
To address these issues, you can use the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin, which allows you to set various quantity limits in your WooCommerce store. It makes setting minimum or maximum allowed quantities extremely easy! In a few minutes, you can enhance your store and prepare for busy periods by limiting product quantities per order.
Moreover, the plugin comes with some awesome additional features to further enhance the WooCommerce quantity input field. Ready to set WooCommerce quantity limits for your store? Get your copy of WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches now.
The simplest way to add quantity rules to your WooCommerce products.
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