Do you run a WooCommerce store and want to offer a discount percentage? Both your sales figures and your customer loyalty can rise using the time-honored technique of discounts. And that’s not all: discounts can also help you clear out old stock, promote new products, and increase the Average Order Value (AOV).
While there are many ways to offer discounts, a percentage discount is one of the most popular ones. A WooCommerce discount as a percentage is simple to implement too.
In this tutorial, we will explore how you can create a WooCommerce discount as a percentage using the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin. First, let’s discuss WooCommerce discounts in general.
Introduction to creating WooCommerce percentage discounts
Offering discounts is an effective way to attract new customers, boost sales, and encourage repeat purchases. Studies show that over 80 percent of shoppers look to use a coupon at checkout. This means the majority of your customers will look for a sale price and want a discount. The positive impact this has on customer loyalty is a recurring benefit.
WooCommerce, the world’s most popular e-commerce platform, comes with built-in options that let you offer discounts based on a number of criteria. However, creating custom discounts can provide additional benefits for store owners.
For example, you can tailor promotions to specific products, customers, or order quantities. This can help differentiate your store from the competition, and provide a more personalized shopping experience. You could offer discounts to customers who have already purchased from you, which will incentivize them to make repeat purchases. This again drives customer loyalty.
In fact, there are three main benefits you’ll stand to leverage when it comes to discounts:
- You’ll increase sales and revenue, because the discount will encourage customers to make purchases they may have been hesitant to make otherwise. This is particularly effective for your AOV, high-ticket items, or for customers who are on the fence about making a purchase.
- Discounts can also be a great way to clear out excess inventory or promote new products. This leads to a more efficient and profitable store on your end.
- WooCommerce discounts are straightforward to create and manage. You can easily experiment with different promotions and find the ones that work best. This flexibility lets you adjust your promotions based on inventory, sales goals, marketing strategies, and more.
On the whole, providing a discount is a powerful tool for any e-commerce site, and WooCommerce offers a variety of discount options. Let’s look at this next.
Types of WooCommerce discounts
WooCommerce offers a range of discount options that can help you attract new customers, boost sales, and encourage repeat purchases. There are three main types, and each can be effective depending on your store’s goals and target audience:
- Percentage discount. This discount type applies a percentage discount to the total cart value. It can help incentivize larger purchases and encourage customers to add more items to their cart in order to reach the discount threshold.
- Fixed discount. Here, you give a set amount off of the total cart value. You can use this type to promote specific products or clear out inventory.
- Free shipping. This popular discount option encourages customers to make purchases they may have been hesitant to make otherwise. Offering free shipping can also help you stand out from the crowd and provide a better shopping experience for your customers.
Offering WooCommerce coupons is straightforward. To do so, head to the Marketing → Coupons screen on the WooCommerce dashboard, then click Add coupon:
Here, you’ll see a few fields to fill in. The most important is the Coupon code field. This will contain whatever the user-facing coupon code will be – EASTER23, for example:
You can also add an optional description, then look to customize the coupon in various ways. However, the default features in WooCommerce can be fairly basic, and you’ll need dedicated plugins to help implement custom discounts.
Further down, we’ll show you how a plugin such as WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches lets you create product-specific discounts, bulk product discounts, and more. First though, let’s look at a WooCommerce discount as a percentage in more detail.
Percentage discounts in WooCommerce
A percentage discount in particular is popular as it offers a simple way to incentivize customers to buy more items or purchase larger quantities. You can apply this to the entire cart, specific WooCommerce products, or even product categories.
For instance, you could offer a ten-percent discount on the product price for every item in a specific category. As an alternative, that ten percent might only apply to orders over a certain amount. This gives you a flexible and tailored approach to promoting your store’s product lines.
The default WooCommerce setup for percentage discounts has lots of strengths:
- It’s simple to manage and track discounts, which makes it easy to monitor how effective a promotion is.
- WooCommerce also offers flexibility if you want to create custom discounts for specific products or categories. This can differentiate your store from others and provide a better shopping experience for customers.
However, while WooCommerce is a user-friendly platform, you may need some technical expertise to set up complex discounts. In fact, you might not be able to set up the discount you want without the need for third-party plugins. This means it’s important to find the right one to help you. We’ll look at this next.
Introducing the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin
The WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin is a powerful way to create custom discounts and pricing rules in WooCommerce. The plugin lets you create percentage discounts (and more) based on product quantity, category, and other elements. You’re also able to create custom swatches for product attributes.
Here’s how the plugin can help you create WooCommerce discounts as a percentage:
- Of course, one of the plugin’s standout features is its ability to help you create quantity-based discounts. In short, this is where the discount percentage increases as the customer adds more items to their cart. For example, you can set a discount percentage of ten percent for purchasing two items, 15 percent for purchasing three items, and 20 percent for purchasing four items. This type of discount can be a great way to incentivize customers to buy more products and increase their AOV.
- You can also create percentage discounts based on specific product categories. This can be useful for promoting certain categories or products, and can help drive sales for those items.
- In addition to percentage discounts, the plugin also offers a range of other discount options. You can choose from fixed discounts, ‘Buy One Get One Free’ (BOGOF) deals, and tiered pricing. As such, you can create custom discounts to suit your store’s (and customer’s) specific needs.
Unlike the competition, WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches gives you myriad design capabilities for those discounts. For instance, the custom swatch feature lets you create product variations that look good on the screen and can help customers make purchasing decisions.
Using the plugin is also super simple and fast. In the rest of the article, we’ll look at how to do it.
Setting up percentage discounts with the plugin (3 steps)
There are a minimal number of steps to set up WooCommerce discount percentages using the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin. However, before you do, you’ll need to install the plugin itself. Let’s tackle this first.
Step 1: Installation
If you have experience with WordPress plugin installs, you’ll feel comfortable here. Regardless, we have a full guide on how to install WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches Plugin in our documentation.
In brief, here are the steps:
- Log into your Studio Wombat account.
- Head to the Plugin downloads screen to grab the plugin’s ZIP file.
- Navigate to the Plugins → Add new screen within WordPress, then click the Upload plugin button.
- Use the file browser to find the plugin ZIP file, upload it, and run through the installation and activation instructions.
- Head back into your Studio Wombat account to locate your license key, and add this to the WooCommerce → Settings → Quantity manager section within WordPress.
At this point, the plugin is ready, and you will be too. Next, we’ll look at how to create a percentage discount.
Step 2: Create percentage discounts with the plugin
To add percentage discount rules, you’ll need to head to a specific WooCommerce product, then scroll to its metabox at the bottom of the screen. Here, look at the General → Tiered pricing type dropdown menu. You’ll want to choose Percentage for this example:
You can add tiers for each ‘level’ of discount. For instance, each tier will require a minimum quantity that a customer needs to purchase before a discount rule applies, and a percentage discount value. You can add as many tiers as you need to set up your discount rules. For instance, you might offer ten percent on a purchase of three items, and 20 percent for five:
Once you save your changes, the product will apply the discount rules. However, that’s not the only step. You should also customize how these discounts present on the product page. In our final section, we’ll look at how to do this using ‘quantity design’.
Step 3: Customize the look and feel of the discount on the front end
Once you’ve set up your discounts, you can give them greater appeal using quantity design. This is where you’ll tailor dropdown menus and other options to product quantities rather than any other attribute. You can also customize any variable product or dynamic pricing within those sections.
One way to do that is through quantity swatches. To set this up, you’ll use the Quantity options section within the product metabox. There are a lot of options here that we cover in our full guide on how to add quantity swatches in WooCommerce. However, the main option we want is the Quantity selector design dropdown menu:
Once you choose Swatches from this menu, another set of options will appear to customize the quantity title, items in each row, and more:
From here, you can design your quantity swatch in full using a number of options, such as a headline, byline, and more:
There’s even a way to change the color scheme you use for quantity swatches within the WooCommerce → Settings → Quantity manager → Quantity settings screen. As such, you have a wealth of options to customize a WooCommerce discount as a percentage, and much more.
The bottom line
Discounts can be a powerful tool for increasing sales and customer loyalty for your WooCommerce store. The WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin can make the setup process for those discounts simple.
What’s more, you get complete control over how you implement a discount from the WordPress dashboard. The plugin is especially fantastic for implementing a WooCommerce discount as a percentage, and it lets you do this in a flash.
A single-site license for WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches starts from $49 per year. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to earn more money, retain customers, and grow your store!
