There are many proven marketing methods for generating instant sales – discounts, special offers, promotions, bonuses, free products…but if you run them for too long it will hurt your profits.
To overcome this problem, WooCommerce store owners need to think creatively. They need to come up with a pricing strategy that gets them more sales without sacrificing profits.
Here’s how WooCommerce dynamic pricing & discounts can help and this article covers everything you need to know to take your e-commerce store to the next level.
In addition, you will see a variety of dynamic pricing and discounts that convert as well as some plugins you can use without hassles.
Let’s begin with the question that’s probably on your mind right now!
What is WooCommerce dynamic pricing?
WooCommerce dynamic pricing or dynamic pricing in general means to sell the same product at different prices to different people based on different factors. These factors can be user role, order total, product quantity, customer’s location, customer’s past purchases, product demand and so on.
Defining and distinguishing prices and discounts can be done best considering these four examples of dynamic pricing:
- Product pricing – Prices and discounts based on the product and the quantity of the product.
- Order pricing – Discounts given on the amount of total cart value or order summary.
- Role pricing – Prices determined as per the user role / profession of the buyer.
- Categories pricing – Pricing decided as per the category of the products (For eg. in clothes: Ethnic, Western, etc) & offer discounts accordingly.
Here’s a simple example of selling watches based on dynamic pricing:
- Offer 15% off your new product, say a smartwatch, to customers who have been with you for a year.
- Offer the same smartwatch at 10% off to customers who made a purchase two months ago.
- Offer a 20% discount to buyers who purchase the watch in bulk – assuming it to be fifty pieces.
- Offer no discount on the smartwatch for the new customers.
Dynamic pricing does not always involve selling products at a discount. It is equally important to make sure you use each of these pricing strategies wisely to grow your store, multiply profits, and manage your business smoothly.
The real motive is to make sure that the customers are satisfied with the perceived value that they receive after the final price of the product is paid to you.
Advantages and disadvantages of dynamic pricing & discounts?
Based on the demand and supply, the pricing keeps fluctuating. But still, you can review the pricing and stay in control of it.
Advantages of dynamic pricing & discounts
Best marketing strategy to boost sales
Discounts are unquestionably one of the best tools for boosting sales. Discounts are what come to the rescue for marketers when they are uncertain about a marketing strategy.
Special price for customer groups
The watches example I mentioned above. Offer more discounts to recent or bulk purchasers compared to customers who buy less or are dormant.
Encourages buyers to spread word-of-mouth publicity
Offering discounts is a fast way to reach unexplored markets and motivate existing buyers to share the news.
Saves money in the long run
In the long run, the use of plugins and analytics gives WooCommerce owners the right information and data to set the right prices for their products and stay profitable regardless of price fluctuations. This saves time and costs in the long run.
There are advantages and disadvantages to everything, so let us see, what are the disadvantages of dynamic pricing?
Disadvantages of dynamic pricing & discounts
Irritated customers
It is possible that dynamic pricing can irritate or even anger customers if they find out that they are being priced differently than others.
Less customer loyalty
When customers trust a company, they tend to repeatedly buy from it and avoid looking for deals anywhere else. However, a company’s dynamic pricing strategy may inspire customers to look at its competitors to ensure that they are not paying too much.
Price fluctuations
Using dynamic pricing can cause significant price fluctuations in the market segment – a competitor may lower their price, planning to make back in volume, in case you increase your prices. A price cut may also backfire if your competitors lower their prices even further.
Increases industry competition
Dynamic pricing communicates that a company focuses more on profits than on customer service. This leads to an increase of competitors in the industry believing that they can create a disruptive influence.
These cons of dynamic pricing and discounts doesn’t mean you should avoid it. If targeted well – users and products and prices seem justified, dynamic pricing gets a big thumbs up.
With that said, let’s move to the core section of the article.
Most-used WooCommerce dynamic pricing and discount strategies with examples
Now, let us help you with the types of WooCommerce dynamic pricing and discounts that will drive your brand the sales it desires!
Bulk pricing discounts or volume-based discounts
Bulk discounts encourage users to buy items in larger quantities. This discounting system offers a product quantity at a normal price, then decreases the price as the quantity increases.
For example:
- Buy more than thirty T-shirts and avail a 40% discount.
- 10% discount per 500 units of fasteners purchased, 15% discount on 1000 units, 20% on 1500 units, and so on…
- Buy one soap for $4, buy three soaps for $10.
Category-wise pricing discount
The offers are valid only in certain categories of WooCommerce products. They influence the buyer to choose a certain brand or product because of the attractive discounts. For example:
- Get 25% off on all Nike shoes.
- Purchase three US Polo Tees & get a 10% discount on the total cart value.
User role-based pricing
Users can receive unique discounts depending on their roles such as customer, wholesaler, retailer, vendor, manager, etc. This encourages them to purchase by looking at the specialized role badge. For example:
- Wholesalers get a flat 20% discount on purchase of 200 units or more.
- Retailers get a flat 5% discount on the purchase of 100 units.
Cart discount
As the name suggests, this discount applies based on the product in the cart or cart value. For example:
- Flat 30% discount on all orders over $250.
- Free shipping for orders over $500.
- 15% discount on the total cart value.
WooCommerce BOGO (Buy One Get One) discount
This is nothing but WooCommerce Buy One Get One discounts. WooCommerce BOGO coupon strategy is a smart way to upsell or increase the sale of the product.
Also, word-of-mouth publicity results in more visitors that are converted into buyers. For example:
- Buy one T-shirt and get one T-shirt free.
- Buy one T-shirt get another T-shirt at 50% off.
Here’s how to create a WooCommerce BOGO offer
Buy more get more, Buy one get more, Buy more, get one…
Not only do BOGO deals convert well, but also buy more get more offers, buy one get more offers and buy more get one offers. You can also combine offers for products from various categories to make the deal even sweeter.
- Buy three perfumes and get a 50% discount on the fourth one.
- Buy a formal shirt and get a set of couplings and pen for 40% off.
- Buy 10 big sized-chocolates and get 15 small-sized chocolates at 20% off.
Here’s how to create Buy X Get Y offer combinations
Gift a product at a discount or for free
By using coupons, you can add products as gifts or discounts. After applying the coupons, the items attached to the coupons are added automatically to the cart for free/discount.
The gift products can be from the present category or from the different one from the one that is already in the cart.
For example:
- A Bluetooth headphone free with mobiles above $299.
- Gift a set of accessories on purchase of a laptop.
Here’s how to gift products via a coupon
Order subtotal
This discount is offered at the time of order subtotal, which includes activities like removing the taxes from the discounts. For example:
- 8% discount on the order subtotal above $500.
- Flat 10% discount on the subtotal of today’s orders.
Coupon-based dynamic discounts
This is one of the most popular WooCommerce dynamic pricing discount strategies amongst customers.
With this strategy, it is possible to offer coupon discounts on special occasions such as festivals, sales, celebrations, or some milestone that has been achieved. Coupons can be redeemable based on restrictions such as location, email address, etc. For example:
- Offer 20% off only on 4th of July to the United States residents.
- Offer 30% off on low-selling products and 20% off on best-sellers.
- Run a 25% off coupon for Boxing Day for customers in Australia, Canada, UK and 15% off coupon for customers residing in other countries for the same day
- Use coupon code ‘CELEBRATIONS’ & get 20% discount on all ethnic wear.
- Get a 10% discount on all lifetime licenses by redeeming the coupon code ‘ANNIVERSARY10’ by or before 31st Jan 2021.
Percentage discounts
Create percentage discounts for single or multiple products, subscription products or one-off purchases, a single product category or multiple categories, total cart total and much more. For example:
- Flat 15% discount on all one-off purchases.
- Flat 10% off on subscription products.
- Buy one chair and get 10% on the second.
- Buy over $100 & get 8% discount on the total cart value.
Purchase-history pricing
Offer discounts based on the purchase history of the customer. These types of WooCommerce pricing discounts could be based on the total amount spent on previous orders or the total number of orders placed by the customer. For example:
- 10% discount for those who purchased items of over $250 in the last two months.
- Flat 20% discount for those who have bought more than 5 pairs of shoes in the last six months.
- 5% discount on shoes to all customers who bought Nike jerseys earlier.
Product+cart+quantity+user based discounts
When you want to offer some discounts to only a limited number of customers, you can club product, cart, and quantity rules together.
For example:
- Offer 15% discount if the cart total exceeds $200 and all the products are from the Cosmetic category.
- Offer a 35% discount to users whose previous purchases exceed $1000, the current cart total is not less than $300 and the product in the cart is a branded perfume and quantity greater than two.
Free shipping
Offering free shipping above an order total can work wonders to encourage customers to spend more.
For example, offer free shipping on orders over $150. This way, you can smartly price some of your products for $140 or $145 and then upsell/cross-sell related products for $10. Customers who need those upsell products won’t mind spending more to qualify the order for free shipping.
Here’s how to set up free shipping
Membership based offers
Some customers are not eligible for your special products or membership plans. To encourage customers to join, you can provide them with different rates and privileges.
Similarly, you might run different promotions for different members. For example, if you launch a new product, you give a 10% discount to your Gold members but only a 5% discount to Silver members.
Phew! That’s quite a list. Think of any other case and it may be tied to dynamic pricing, tiered pricing, shipping-based discounts, or even bundle discounts.
Run targeted discounts and offers. You get the idea right?
Now, let’s just explore some of the top WooCommerce dynamic pricing & discounts plugins that can be used in your store.
Best WooCommerce dynamic pricing plugins
With hundreds of dynamic pricing cases, one plugin can’t cover them all. WooCommerce has great tools available that can help you set up a robust dynamic pricing strategy.
But here, we list some plugins that cover most of the widely used cases of dynamic pricing and discounts, ones which you need to implement on your store.
Offermative
Offermative is an AI-based plugin that automatically runs offers and discounts on your WooCommerce store.
Product selection, targeting rules, offer copywriting, designing, conditional logic…everything is automated.
Select offer campaigns, run them and see your sales soar. Here’s an in-depth Offermative review.
Top features:
- Smart algorithms help you show campaigns to visitors, keep converting them to customers, and maintain a track of results.
- All the offer types – WooCommerce upsell, cross-sell, order bump, cart bump, percentage / flat discount coupons, Amazon like frequently bought together, sitewide sale…
- High converting, beautifully designed, mobile responsive offer message design templates: inline, header / footer bars, slide ins, overlay popups…
- Run highly targeted offers on hundreds of products. You may never know what can convert.
Smart Offers for WooCommerce
Smart Offers is designed to specially meet your goals of running offers based on powerful targeting rules. Set up powerful WooCommerce upsell, cross-sell, BOGO, order bump and other offers.
Essentially, you can’t directly you can set up a dynamic pricing offer or discount on the product, but you can set the discount on products you are going to offer as an upsell or cross-sell.
Top features:
- Set up a buy one get one (BOGO), buy more get more offer.
- Show an offer only when cart order contains X number of products.
- Show an offer only when order total or subtotal is less or more than equal to X amount.
- Offer additional discount when user is a vendor and quantity purchased is greater than X.
- Show offer only when user has previously placed more than X orders or purchased more than Y amount.
- Show offer if user is registered past ‘X’ number of months.
- Time based offer during Black Cyber – Run an offer only from 27th Nov to 30th Nov.
- Show a product at 25% off when a product from the same or other category is added to cart.
- Enable direct checkout or one-click checkout using Buy Now buttons/links.
and many other possibilities….
WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing
Dynamic Pricing plugin can be purchased from the WooCommerce marketplace. It allows you to set prices for your store based on four factors:
Advanced product pricing
This pricing method is favorable when you need to offer discounts on the quantity of the order. It offers bulk discounts by clearly showing how much the amount is reduced in the form of a discount against the quantity of the product. Also, it can be applied to members having specific tags like ‘Gold Members’. For example:
- Offer the Microwave at a discount of 10% if the customer purchases 2 more items from the same category.
- 10% discount on Ethnic Wear today to normal members and 25% discount to Gold Members for the same.
Advanced category pricing
It is useful when you need to offer discounts on the product based on the same category the customer is purchasing. For example – Get a 15% discount on all handmade items if you purchase 3 or more items from the handmade category.
Simple category pricing:
As the name suggests, a discount is applied to a specific category of the store. For example – Flat 8% discount on all mobile phones today.
Role-based pricing
These discounts are allotted to specific role users or simply on all products of the store. For example:
- All the members with Platinum Membership get a flat discount of 10% on all the items of the store today.
- Flat 8% discount on all the items of the store today.
Pricing: $129
Get WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing plugin
Smart Coupons
Although it’s a coupon plugin, it is ‘Smart Coupons’. So, you can use to set some dynamic pricing and discount offers to boost your sales. This is the official WooCommerce coupon extension.
It has everything you need to boost sales – discount vouchers, gift cards, store credits, advanced restrictions, URL coupons, etc.
With Smart Coupons, you can:
- Set up discounts based on product quantity in the cart.
- Set up discount offers based on individual product quantity.
- Set up discount offers based on individual product category quantity.
- Allow discounts on combinations of products from different categories based on quantity.
- Offer gifts via a coupon.
- Set up location-based discounts.
- Set up a Buy One Get One offer.
WISDM Customer Specific Pricing for WooCommerce
By bridging the gap between you and your customer, the plugin transforms your relationship with them. It offers meaningful and useful discounts to your customers.
WISDM stands out with its uniquely useful benefits that help their customers take the eCommerce store pricing to the next level.
Top features:
- Creating a special page having their personalized discounts listed
- Attracting customers by offering role-based discounts
- Encouraging customers to shop by setting customized pricing for their group or segment
- Offering Buy One Get One & Bulk Discounts to bulk quantity purchasers like wholesalers, managers, etc.
- Conducting store-wide discounts on some special occasions, festivals or during holidays.
Pricing: Starts from $80
Get WISDM Customer Specific Pricing plugin
Other WooCommerce dynamic pricing plugins
You can likewise examine these plugins. A seriously decent number of highlights cover a portion of the utilization cases referenced previously.
- WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts by RightPress
- Dynamic Pricing With Discount Rules for WooCommerce
- Advanced Dynamic Pricing for WooCommerce
- Discount Rules for WooCommerce
Ready to boost your sales?
Seems like you are now ready to implement dynamic pricing and discounts on your store. Keep on experimenting with the various pricing types mentioned, track performance and identity what works best for you.
There are already the best plugins for it listed, so all you need to do is choose.
Do you have any suggestions for the article? Would love to hear what you think.