Not all prices are set in stone. Many businesses offer discounts for bulk purchases, loyal customers, or various sales. With a WooCommerce dynamic pricing plugin, you can offer these kinds of dynamic prices at your store.
Enabling dynamic pricing in WooCommerce means you don’t have to run around creating individual discount codes or changing prices manually. Instead, all you need is the right plugin.
In this article, we’re going to talk about when it makes sense to offer dynamic pricing. Then we’ll teach you how to implement this feature in WooCommerce with a free plugin.
Let’s get to work!
When to offer WooCommerce dynamic pricing
Most of the time, ‘dynamic pricing’ refers to various discounts you might offer to customers. Usually, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to inflate prices, as that’s not likely to win you any additional sales.
With that in mind, there are several circumstances in which you might want to offer discounted prices to your users, such as:
- When someone makes a bulk purchase
- If you offer product bundles
- To encourage visitors to buy specific products (e.g., during a clearance sale)
- As part of a loyalty rewards program
Each of these strategies helps boost sales in some way. Bulk purchase and product bundle discounts encourage customers to buy larger quantities of items. Sales can help you clear stock you would otherwise take a loss on. Loyalty programs improve retention rates.
Updating prices in WooCommerce is simple. However, instead of continuously having to edit specific products or item categories to implement various discounts, it makes more sense to automate the process.
How to add dynamic pricing to WooCommerce for free
As usual, when it comes to plugins, there’s more than one tool you can use to add WooCommerce dynamic pricing to your site. Let’s start by going over what your options are, then we’ll show you how to configure our recommend solution.
Step 1: Select a WooCommerce dynamic pricing plugin
The most well-known plugin in this category is the official Dynamic Pricing WooCommerce extension. However, it costs $129 per year, which may not be feasible for new online stores or some very small eCommerce businesses. Fortunately, there are some budget-friendly alternatives.
As far as free WooCommerce dynamic pricing plugins go, there are two that offer you the most options when it comes to implementation. Advanced Dynamic Pricing for WooCommerce enables you to set discounts using specific rules:
You can also use it to configure prices based on user roles (which makes it excellent for loyalty rewards systems) and to import value tables.
Another solid choice is Dynamic Pricing With Discount Rules for WooCommerce. This plugin offers the same base functionality as our previous pick, and also enables you to prioritize specific discounts, set front end labels so users know about your offers, and more:
For this tutorial, we’re going to use Dynamic Pricing With Discount Rules for WooCommerce because it’s more user-friendly. Keep in mind that we’ll be showcasing the plugin’s free version, but there’s also a premium option that packs additional features.
Step 2: Configure your dynamic pricing rules
Once you install and activate the Dynamic Pricing With Discount Rules plugin, you can start setting up some simple dynamic pricing rules. To get started, click on Pricing Rules > Add New Rule in your dashboard:
A new form will open, including all the options at your disposal. First, name your rule:
Dynamic Pricing With Discount Rules enables you to set priority levels for your rules in case of overlapping instructions. Since this is your first, set the Priority to one and toggle the button under Active to the ‘on’ position.
Further down, you can decide whether to apply the rule only to logged-in customers. This makes sense for loyalty reward discounts, but you may want to offer more general dynamic pricing in other situations, such as sales.
For now, leave the Product Lists option set to All – we’ll cover this shortly. Move on to Discount Type:
The options are fairly straightforward. If you want to offer a bulk discount, for example, you can select Quantity based discount. Doing so will yield the following settings:
In this example, we set up a rule that offers a fixed-price discount of $10 for customers who buy a minimum of two of the same product. We also toggled the Show pricing table option ‘on’ to display our bulk purchase options on our product pages.
Once you’re done tweaking your settings, remember to save them. Your new rule will then appear in the Pricing Rules tab, where you can toggle its Status to Active whenever you’re ready:
Let’s return to the topic of product lists. Using this feature, you can apply dynamic pricing to specific items. This can be especially useful for certain types of sales.
To do so, go to Pricing Rules > Product Lists > Add New List:
Here, name your list, then choose the Products Selection option under Type. Finally, add specific products to your list and publish it:
Your list will now appear as an option under Product List when you create a new WooCommerce dynamic pricing rule.
Step 3: Test your discount rules
Whenever you’re using a plugin that applies rules across your site, it’s smart to check and make sure it’s working properly after you configure it. In this case, that simply means previewing one of your product pages:
The example bulk purchase rule we created works perfectly, as you can see by looking at the pricing table in the image above. Customers will also see a notification when they add a product with dynamic pricing to their cart:
You can customize this notification by going to Pricing Rules > Settings > General Settings. You can modify your pricing table’s styling in Pricing Rules > Settings > Pricing Table.
With scheduled dynamic pricing such as sales, you may also want to announce your discount with a notification bar. Alternatively, you can send out promotional emails to inform existing customers they should head over to your site to snag a deal on your products.
Conclusion
Updating prices in WooCommerce is easy, but it’s not efficient to do so manually if you’re going to offer a wide variety of discounts regularly.
The logical approach is to use a plugin that automates the process for you.
When it comes to implementing WooCommerce dynamic pricing, we’re partial to Dynamic Pricing With Discount Rules for WooCommerce due to its ease of use and friendly interface. You can use it to set up discount rules for any products you want.
To make sure you get the most from your dynamic pricing, you’ll also want to optimize your product pages.
We’ve also collected some other useful plugins to improve your WooCommerce store.
Do you have any questions about WooCommerce dynamic pricing? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!
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