WooCommerce guide to tiered pricing (2023)

Adding WooCommerce tiered pricing to your online store is a way to offer bulk discounts and increase the average order value (AOV) of your store. It’s a win-win for both you and your customers: you sell more products and your customers get their products for a cheaper unit price.

In this complete guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about WooCommerce tiered pricing.

What is WooCommerce tiered pricing?

Traditionally, a product only has 1 price: the unit price. With a tiered pricing strategy, you define multiple unit prices, each with a discount for buying in bulk. Put simply: you reduce the cost of your product when your customer orders a higher quantity or volume.

This strategy is known by various names, including “bulk discount,” “quantity discount,” and “pricing brackets,” which all refer to the same concept.

Here’s a simple example with 4 tiers:

• Buy 1 item at $10.
• Buy 2 items at $8 each, giving you a discount of $2 per item.
• Buy 5 or more items at $6 each, giving you a 40% discount per item.
• Buy 10 or more items at $5 each, giving you a 50% discount per item.

If a customer buys 7 items, they would pay $42 in total (7 * $6).

Now that we know how it works, let’s take a look at some real-life examples!

Canva: Print on Demand

Canva implements quantity discounts for its Print on Demand (PoD) products. You can design and print business cards in bulk. They offer a discount for every quantity tier:

This entices customers to buy a higher quantity at a discount, which increases Canva’s profit margin.

Pay-per-seat or pay-per-user

Tiered pricing doesn’t only work for physical products, it also works extremely well for digital services. For example, Dropbox offers a cheaper price for family accounts:

This allows Dropbox to sell the same product in different packages, without additional costs for them.

How your store benefits from tiered pricing

In our opinion, using the tiered pricing strategy is a no-brainer. It works for almost any business type and has a lot of advantages:

• Increase your Average Order Value (AOV). AOV is a measure of the average amount spent on your store per order. The higher the amount, the higher your revenue. Tiered pricing, or offering different prices based on the quantity of items purchased, is a simple way to increase your AOV and revenue without requiring much effort on your part. By encouraging customers to purchase larger quantities, you can increase the average dollar amount spent on each order, resulting in an overall increase in your store’s revenue.
• You do not need to sell new products to increase profit margins. You are upselling the same product to your customers, with an offer they can’t refuse.
• Increase customer satisfaction. Offering quantity discounts is a win-win: you increase your profits while your customers get a discount on their order. Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend your store to others or leave a positive review, further increasing your store’s reach.

Now that you know what tiered pricing is and why you should be using this strategy, let’s take a look at how to set this all up in WooCommerce!

Setting up tiered pricing in WooCommerce

In this section, we’ll look at how to set up tiered pricing for your WooCommerce store. It’s easier than it sounds!

WooCommerce has a built-in feature to offer discounts: coupon codes. However, these coupon codes do not work on quantity level. Furthermore, they require your user to manually enter the discount code during checkout. This approach is not user-friendly and not suited for implementing a tiered pricing strategy.

The easiest way to get started is by using the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin to create tiered pricing in WooCommerce.

This plugin helps you maximize profits simply by enhancing the quantity features of WooCommerce. Here are its main features:

• Set rules about the allowed quantity of a product. You can set the minimum or maximum allowed quantity or step intervals.
• Define bulk discounts (quantity-based discounts). This will be discussed in depth in this tutorial.
• Replace the default WooCommerce quantity input box with beautiful quantity swatches. The plugin allows you to entice buyers even more to buy in bulk by replacing the boring WooCommerce quantity input field with beautifully designed clickable swatches.

Step 1: install the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin

Before we can dive into the real work, you have to purchase the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin from the Wombat Plugins store. This plugin is a real powerhouse for all quantity-related features!

Once the plugin is purchased, download the ZIP file from your Wombat Account. On your WordPress site, navigate to WooCommerce → Settings → Quantity Manager and enter your license key to activate the plugin. Click on the Activate button and then the Save changes button to continue.

Step 2: set up tiered pricing for your WooCommerce products

In this step, we will configure quantity discounts on your WooCommerce products. You can choose to define discounts on a single product (via the “edit product” screen) or on multiple products in one go (via the “product categories” screen).

Adding quantity discounts to a specific product

If you want to add tiered pricing to a specific product, go to Products → All Products and edit your product. In the Product Data box, activate the General tab.

In the Tiered pricing type dropdown, you can select how you’d like to configure your discounts. You can choose between 2 options:

• Fixed price: the price you enter is the discounted unit price.
• Percentage: the number you enter is the percentage discount the customer will receive.

Once your desired tier type is set, you can add tiers by clicking the Add tier button. A tier has 2 settings:

• Starting quantity: the minimum quantity the customer has to purchase to get this discount.
• Discount: the new product price or percentage discount.

Let’s use the tiered pricing example from earlier in this article:

• Buy 1 item at $10.
• Buy 2-4 items at $8 each.
• Buy 5-9 items at $6 each.
• Buy 10 or more items at $5 each.

To define this correctly in WooCommerce, you will need to do 3 things:

1. Set the tier type to Fixed Price.
2. Set the regular price to $10, because that’s the price for just 1 item (our first tier).
3. Define the remaining 3 tiers to match the example.

This is what your settings should look like:

When you are done, don’t forget to publish or update your WooCommerce product. That’s how easy it is to configure quantity-based discounts for your WooCommerce store!

Adding quantity discounts to multiple products at once

As mentioned earlier, you can also attach tiered pricing settings to multiple WooCommerce products at once. To do this, navigate to Products → Categories and edit the category you want to add quantity discounts to. Scroll down to find the same tiered pricing settings, as discussed in the previous section of this tutorial:

Now, the tiered pricing settings will apply to all products in this category.

Step 3: display the discounts on your WooCommerce product page

The tiered pricing discounts are now active in WooCommerce, but your customers won’t be aware that they can receive a discount by purchasing more items. To let customers know about the discount, we need to display the various tiers on the product page in a nice table.

To do this, navigate to WooCommerce → Settings → Quantity Manager and apply the following settings:

• Show Pricing Table: enable this setting to show a pricing table with discounts on products that have bulk discounts.
• Table Position: define where you want to show the table on the product page. For the best results, we recommend to show it above or below the Add to Cart button.
• Table Columns: a comma-separated list of which data you want to show in the table.
• Table Titles: the titles for the table headings.

Below is an example of a table showing the range, price, and discount data points. The style of the table is taken over from your theme.

Step 4: show the discount in cart and checkout

When a customer adds a discounted product to their cart, it’s a good idea to show the discount on the cart and checkout pages too. This reminds your customer they got a good deal:

To do this, navigate back to WooCommerce → Settings → Quantity Manager and enable the Show Discount in Cart setting.

Bonus step: display quantity swatches

Instead of using the default quantity input box as seen in the screenshot above, you can turn those into beautiful clickable buttons or swatches like this:

You have full control over the colors and design, so you can just as easily turn it into something like this:

To create this type of quantity selector, we recommend reading this article on how to create beautiful quantity swatches.

In conclusion: creating tiered pricing is easy in WooCommerce

In our opinion, most stores can benefit from using a WooCommerce tiered pricing strategy. This type of strategy lets you offer customers a lower rate per product once the product quantity threshold (“tier”) you’ve specified is met.

The fastest and most powerful way to create a tiered pricing structure for your store is by using the WooCommerce Quantity Discounts, Rules & Swatches plugin. Bonus: it comes with additional powerful features that can help you increase your profit margin further.