Searching for the best way to offer a free gift when shoppers purchase something on your WooCommerce store?
In this post, you’ll learn a flexible and code-free way to run free gift campaigns using the Merchant plugin.
With Merchant, you’ll be able to offer one or more free gift options and promote your offer(s) using a special free gift widget like this:
You can give access to the free gift based on a person’s spending or require them to enter a coupon code.
Ready to learn how it works? Let’s get into the full guide…
A High-Level Look At Offering Free Gifts With Merchant
Before I get to the actual tutorial, I first want to quickly share the options that you’ll have for configuring your free gifts with Merchant, along with some other details on the Merchant plugin.
By briefly covering these details, you should have a good idea of whether this method is right for your store before you start the full tutorial.
Merchant lets you create unlimited free gift offers on your store.
You could run the free gift offers one at a time or simultaneously run multiple offers and control their priority. You can also offer “tiered” free gifts, where shoppers can only claim one free gift from the available options and any newly claimed gift will replace the previous ones.
You can choose between two different conditions to offer a free gift:
- Minimum spending goal – shoppers must spend a certain amount to claim the free gift. You could count all spending or only the spending on certain products.
- Coupon – shoppers can apply a coupon to claim the free gift.
You can also add user conditions so that only certain shoppers can access the free gift campaigns, such as shoppers with a specific user role.
Finally, you also get tons of options to control where/when/how your free gift offers display. For example, you can add a free gift widget to some/all of your store that promotes the different free gift offers. You can also customize all of the text, colors, widgets, labels, and so on to make them your own.
The cool thing about Merchant is that it’s not just a WooCommerce free gift plugin. It’s actually a modular toolkit with 45+ different features to boost your store’s revenue and improve the shopping experience for visitors.
You can browse all of the features here, but some of the most notable enhancements include product bundles, frequently bought together, bulk discounts, Buy X Get Y deals, countdown timers, slide-out side cart, enhanced product reviews, real-time product search, added to cart popups, and lots more.
And don’t worry – because Merchant is 100% modular, your store will not be slowed down by any features that you’re not using. You can pick and choose exactly what to enable on your store to avoid any bloat.
How to Offer a Free Gift With Purchase in WooCommerce
Now, let’s get into the actual step-by-step guide on how to set up your first free gift campaign with Merchant…
1. Purchase, Install, and Activate Merchant Pro
To get started, you’ll want to install and activate the Merchant Pro plugin on your store.
While the core Merchant plugin is available for free at WordPress.org, you’ll need Merchant Pro to access the Free Gifts module. The premium version also gives you access to all 45+ modules, which will probably give you the ability to replace some other plugins on your site.
Merchant Pro starts at just $79 for use on a single site – you can purchase it here or by clicking the button below.
Once you install and activate the plugin, I recommend adding your license key so that you can receive automatic updates. You can do this by going to Merchant → Settings in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Enable the Free Gifts Module
As I mentioned earlier, Merchant uses a modular approach for its features so that it doesn’t need to load code for any features that you don’t want to use on your store.
Before you can set up your free gift campaigns, you first need to enable the module:
- Go to Merchant → Dashboard in your WordPress dashboard.
- Click on the Free Gifts, which should be listed under the Boost Revenue category.
On the next screen, click the blue Enable button at the top of the page.
3. Configure General Free Gift Settings
Next, you’ll want to configure the general settings for the free gift functionality on your store. After that, I’ll cover actually creating the individual free gift campaigns that you want to run.
These are the settings contained in the following three sections on the module’s page:
- Cart Settings
- Gift Widget
- Look and Feel
For now, you can skip the settings in the Floating Gift Widget section, as this is what I’ll show you in the next section.
Let’s go through the three general settings areas…
Cart Settings
The Cart Settings area lets you make one very important choice – which cart amount to use when calculating whether someone is eligible for the free gift(s).
The Gift based on spending type drop-down gives you two options:
- Cart subtotal – this will be the total value of the person’s cart before any additional discounts (or charges) are applied.
- Cart total – this will be the total value after any additional discounts or charges have been applied.
For example, let’s say you set your free gift trigger to $100. If a person has a cart worth $100 but then applies a 10% discount, it would be as follows:
- Cart subtotal – the shopper would be eligible because their cart subtotal is $100.
- Cart total – the shopper would not be eligible because their cart total is only $90 after applying the discount.
In addition to that important choice, you can also customize the text that users see around the free gift when they’re looking at their shopping carts.
Finally, you can also choose whether to enable Tiered Free Gifts. If you enable this, customers will only be able to claim one free gift per order. If they select a new gift, it will replace any previously chosen gift.
This might be helpful if you want to run multiple free gift campaigns but limit how many gifts you give per order.
Gift Widget
The Gift Widget settings let you control the slide-out widget that promotes your free gift offers.
That is, the location of this widget:
Here are what the various settings allow:
- Widget icon – you can choose from five different options for the icon that appears in the widget.
- Position – you can choose from four different options – Top Right, Top Left, Bottom Right, or Bottom Left.
- Distance – this lets you control the distance of the widget from the top or bottom of the page.
- Show on pages – this lets you control which pages (or types of pages) should display the widget. By default, the widget will show everywhere. However, you can uncheck boxes to hide it on certain types of content, such as hiding it on your homepage.
Look and Feel
Finally, you can use the Look and Feel settings to customize all of the colors of various parts of your free gift campaign, along with a few other details.
As with the previous settings, you should see the live preview update according to your color settings as you make changes.
4. Set Up Your Floating Gift Widget Campaign(s)
Now that you’ve set up the general settings, you’re ready to configure the individual free gift campaign(s).
To do this, scroll back up to the Floating Gift Widget section at the top of the module settings area.
Choosing the Type of Offer
To create your first offer, click the Add New Offer button.
This will display options for the two types of offers that you can create:
- Spending Based – shoppers will be able to claim the free gift if they meet the spending goal that you define. You can also add restrictions, such as only counting certain products toward the spending goal.
- Coupon Based – shoppers will be able to claim the free gift after they enter a coupon code.
Once you choose the type of free gift campaign that you want to create, you’ll see some additional settings that apply to that type of campaign.
Let’s go through setting up both spending based and coupon based free gift offers, starting with spending based offers.
Setting Up a Spending Based Free Gift Widget
If you choose a spending based goal, you’ll get additional options to choose the exact spending goal to use, which product purchases count toward that spending goal, and some other options.
Choose Which Products Trigger the Free Gift
First, you’ll want to choose which products will make the shopper eligible for a free gift using the Products that can be purchased to claim the gift option. That is, only products that meet these conditions will count toward the spending goal.
You get three options:
- All products – every single product on your store will count toward the free gift spending goal.
- Specific products – only the specific products that you select will count towards the free gift spending goal.
- Specific categories – any product in the categories that you select will count toward the spending goal.
If you choose All products or Specific categories, you’ll also get an Exclude Products setting that lets you manually exclude specific products from counting toward the free gift spending goal.
Set Up Spending Goal
Next, you can use the Spending goal box to enter the spending goal that shoppers must meet in order to trigger the free gift.
This goal will either be applied to the cart subtotal or cart total, depending on your earlier choice.
Choose Which Product to Award As Gift
To select which product to offer as a gift, you can use the Product rewarded as a gift search box to search all of the products on your store, including any product variations that you’ve added.
If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to add the free gift item as an actual product (Products → Add New) before it will appear here.
Add User Conditions to Restrict Who Can Access the Free Gift (Optional)
If you only want certain shoppers to be able to take advantage of the free gift offer, you can use the User Condition drop-down.
You get three options:
- All Users – every single shopper can get the free gift if they reach the minimum spending goal.
- Selected Users – only the specific user accounts that you select can access the free gift.
- Selected Roles – any user with one of the selected roles can access the free gift offer.
Edit Labels As Needed
Finally, you get several options to control the labels for your offer, such as the CTAs to encourage shoppers to meet the minimum spending goal.
You also get some merge tags that you can use to dynamically insert information, such as the amount people still need to spend to meet the goal.
Setting Up a Coupon Based Free Gift Widget
If you choose to create a coupon based free gift offer, you’ll be able to link your free gift offer to a coupon that you’ve created with WooCommerce’s built-in coupon tool.
Set Up Your Coupon In WooCommerce
If you haven’t done so already, you’ll first need to use the built-in WooCommerce coupon tool to add the coupon that you want to use for your free gift offer:
- Go to Marketing → Coupons in your WordPress dashboard.
- Click the Add coupon button to create a new coupon.
If you only want the coupon to add the free gift without offering any other discounts, you should set the Coupon amount to zero so that it doesn’t add any extra discount. However, if you want to do something like “10% off and a free gift”, you can also do that.
You can also add a Coupon expiry date if you want it to automatically expire on a certain date.
For most use cases, you’ll also want to add usage restrictions to control who is eligible to apply the coupon.
For example, if you only want people who spend $100 to be able to get the free gift, you should set this minimum spending restriction in the coupon’s settings. That way, the shopper will need to both meet the spending goal and enter the coupon to claim their free gift.
You can also add usage restrictions for which products the coupon can be used with, whether the coupon can be used with other coupons, and so on.
You can set up most of these from the Usage restriction tab in the coupon’s settings:
You can also set redemption limits for overall redemptions or individual redemptions in the Usage limits tab.
Finish Set Up in Merchant Pro
Once you’ve added your coupon in WooCommerce, you can go back to the Merchant Pro Free Gifts module settings.
In the settings for your offer, you’ll make two important choices:
- Product – search for and select the product that you want to offer as a free gift.
- Use coupon… – use the drop-down to select the coupon that you just created in the previous step.
5. Set Up Priority Ordering (If Running Multiple Free Gift Offers)
If you’re only running a single free gift offer, you don’t need to do anything here. Your free gift campaign is already live and should be working as you intend it to.
However, if you set up multiple free gift offers, Merchant lets you control the ordering of those offers by using drag and drop. Changing this order will control the order of the free gifts as listed in the free gift widget.
6. Test Your Free Gift Offers
To finish things out, I recommend testing your free gift offers to make sure they’re working as you intend them to.
If everything looks good, you’re all done!
If you ever want to create, edit, or delete a free gift offer, you can just go back to the module settings area.
Start Running Free Gift WooCommerce Campaigns Today
That wraps up our guide on how to use Merchant Pro to offer free gifts on your WooCommerce store.
With Merchant, you can run flexible free gift campaigns based on coupons and/or minimum spending goals.
Plus, your purchase of Merchant Pro also gets you access to 45+ other modules to boost your store’s revenue and create a better shopping experience. And because these features are 100% modular, you don’t need to worry about adding any bloat to your store for the features that you’re not using.
If you’re ready to get started, purchase Merchant Pro today.
Or, you can also create your own fully functioning demo site for free to try before you buy – just click the Try Live Demo button on the Merchant homepage.
