How to Create Bulk Discounts in WooCommerce

Searching for the best way to create bulk discount offers on your WooCommerce store?

While WooCommerce doesn’t offer built-in functionality for bulk discounts, you can easily add this type of discounting to your store using a plugin.

In this post, you’ll learn how you can use the Merchant plugin to set up flexible bulk discount deals that look something like this:

You get lots of options for controlling the actual discount deal. You can choose between fixed or percentage discounts and then control exactly which products are eligible for the discount using four different options:

• All products
• Individual products that you select
• Products in a certain category
• Products with a certain tag

You can also choose whether shoppers must meet the minimum quantity by purchasing multiples of the same product or whether they can meet it by purchasing different eligible products in any combination that adds up to the minimum quantity. If you want more control, you can also restrict which users are eligible to access the deal.

Beyond that, you can also easily customize the text and styling of your bulk discount deals, along with displaying deals on different areas of your site including the single product, cart, checkout, and thank you pages.

Finally, you can create unlimited bulk discount offers. In cases where multiple offers apply to the same product, you can use drag-and-drop priority ordering to choose which offer should be active.

Let’s get into it…

A Quick Intro to the Merchant Plugin

In the introduction, I gave you a lot of information about how the Merchant plugin lets you create WooCommerce bulk discount deals.

However, the cool thing about Merchant is that it’s not just a bulk discount plugin. Instead, it’s a modular toolkit of 47+ different features that you can use to improve your store and boost your revenue.

To start, Merchant can help you implement other discounting strategies beyond bulk discounts, including BOGO deals, storewide sales, free gifts, product bundles, and more.

Beyond discounts, you also get tons of other helpful modules, including frequently bought together products, countdown timers, sticky add to cart bars, Shopify-style slideout cart, real-time product search, wishlists, and lots more.

You can click this link to view all 47+ modules in the Merchant plugin.

Most importantly, Merchant is 100% modular, which means it will only load the specific features that you enable on your store. 

This keeps your store loading fast by making sure that any unused features will have zero effect on your store’s performance.

How to Set Up WooCommerce Bulk Discounts

Now, let’s get into the actual step-by-step guide on how to set up bulk discounts with the Merchant plugin.

1. Install and Activate the Merchant Pro Plugin

To get started, you’ll need to install and activate the Merchant plugin on your store.

While there is a free version of Merchant at WordPress.org, you need Merchant Pro to access the Bulk Discounts module. Merchant Pro also gives you access to all 47+ modules that the plugin offers, so you can access a lot of features beyond just bulk discounting.

Merchant Pro starts at $79 – you can purchase your license here.

Once you’ve purchased Merchant Pro, you’ll want to install both the free Merchant plugin and Merchant Pro on your store.

I also recommend adding your license key to Merchant Pro so that you can enable automatic updates (Merchant → Settings → License Activation).

2. Enable the Bulk Discounts Module

As I mentioned earlier, Merchant uses a modular approach to ensure that your store’s performance won’t be affected by any features that you’re not actively using.

So, before you can start setting up your bulk discounts, you need to enable the Bulk Discounts module in Merchant:

1. Go to Merchant → Dashboard in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Click on the Bulk Discounts module, which should be listed under “Boost Revenue”.

On the next screen, click the blue Enable button to activate the module on your site.

3. Set Up Your First Bulk Discount Offer

Now that you’ve enabled the module, you’re ready to create your first bulk discount offer.

To do this, you can just edit the default campaign that Merchant creates for you, which will be listed under the Offers column.

Let’s go through all of the settings…

Choose Products and Quantity to Access the Deal

To start, you’ll want to select which products are eligible for the bulk discount.

You can choose from four different options to select those products:

• All products – every single product on your store will be eligible for bulk discounts. If you choose this option, you also get additional settings that let you exclude individual products from the discount (Exclude Products) or exclude entire categories of products from the discount (Exclude Categories).
• Specific products – only the specific products that you select will be eligible for the bulk discount. You can select products by searching for them by name.
• Specific categories – all of the products in the categories that you select will be eligible for the discount. If you choose this option, you’ll get an additional Exclude Products setting that lets you manually exclude individual products.
• Specific tags – all of the products with the tag(s) that you select will be eligible for the discount. If you choose this option, you’ll get an additional Exclude Products setting that lets you manually exclude individual products.

If you choose All products or Specific categories, you’ll also get an additional toggle switch for Include all cart products or Include all category products. When enabled, here’s how things change:

• Include all cart products – shoppers can meet the minimum quantity based on the total number of products in their cart. For example, instead of requiring them to purchase “Three of Product A”, they could purchase one of Product A, one of Product B, and one of Product C, or any other combination of eligible products that adds up to three.
• Include all category products – shoppers can meet the minimum quantity based on the number of products from that category in their cart. For example, instead of requiring them to purchase “Three of any particular product in Category A”, they could purchase any combination of eligible products from Category A that adds up to three.

Once you’ve selected the products, you can then use the Quantity box to control the minimum quantity that shoppers must purchase in order to get the bulk discount. For example, entering “3” in the Quantity box means shoppers must buy three of the same item (or any combination of three eligible items if the ‘Include all’ option is enabled) to receive the discount.

Customize the Bulk Discount

Next, you can customize the actual bulk discount deal. You can choose from two different Discount types:

1. Percentage – shoppers get a percentage discount on the total value of all the eligible products.
2. Fixed – shoppers get a fixed dollar amount discount. The discount applies to each eligible item. For example, if you enter “10” as the fixed discount and the shopper purchases three of that item, the shopper would get a total of $30 off ($10 discount * three items).

Below that, you also get a toggle button that lets you control whether or not shoppers can stack other coupons on top of the bulk discount.

If you leave the toggle turned off, shoppers can add coupons for additional discounts. If you turn the toggle on, coupon codes will not stack on top of the bulk discount.

Control Which Users Can Access the Deal

By default, every shopper will be able to access the bulk discount.

However, if you want to restrict access to the deal, you can do so using the User Condition drop-down.

You get three options:

• All Users – every single shopper can get the bulk discount (default).
• Selected Users – only the specific user accounts that you select can access the deal.
• Selected Roles – anyone with one of the user roles that you select can access the deal. For example, you could create special roles for wholesale or VIP customers and only offer those people the bulk discount.

4. Choose Where to Display Bulk Discount Offer

To give you the flexibility to promote your bulk discount offers in different ways, Merchant lets you display the bulk discount deals in four potential locations on your store:

• Product single page
• Cart page
• Checkout page
• Thank you page

By default, Merchant will only show the deal on the product single page. However, if you want to enable the other areas, you can easily do so by expanding the accordion settings for those placements.

Let’s go through what each location looks like, along with the options you have for customizing how your deals display in each location.

Product Single Page

By default, Merchant Pro will exclusively display the bulk discount deal on the single product page. It looks something like this:

You can disable this placement if you want, but we don’t recommend it as it’s one of the most effective places to promote your bulk discount offers.

To customize the location, content, and styling of this box, you get lots of options.

First, you can choose the Placement on product page. You get two preset placement options:

• Before add to cart
• After add to cart

If you want more control, Merchant also lets you manually place the offer using a shortcode. You could place this shortcode in the product description boxes, inject it using theme hooks, or add it directly to your child theme template files.

To use the shortcode, you first need to enable the Use shortcode toggle, which is available at the bottom of the module settings area. Then, you can manually place the discount offer anywhere on the single product page by using the [merchant_module_volume_discounts] shortcode.

Below the placement settings, you get options to customize all of the text in the offer box. You can also use content tags to dynamically insert the information of the deal, such as the quantity and discount amounts.

Then, at the bottom, you can control the fonts and colors of the offer box.

Cart Page

With the Cart Page option, you can display the bulk discount details on the shopping cart page. This gives you a way to encourage users to increase the quantity of items in their carts before they start the checkout process.

Here’s an example of what it might look like:

If you want to use this placement option, set the Cart Page Status drop-down to Active. You can then customize the text of the offer.

Checkout Page

With the Checkout Page option, you can display the bulk discount details as shoppers are completing the checkout process. The exact location will depend on your WooCommerce theme, but here’s an example of what it might look like:

If you want to use this placement option, set the Checkout Page Status drop-down to Active. You can then choose from six different placement locations and customize the text of the offer.

Here are the six different locations that you can use:

1. Before billing details
2. After billing details
3. Before order details
4. Before payment gateways
5. Before place order button
6. After place order button

Thank You Page

The Thank You page displays after the user places their order, which means that you can use this location as a sort of post-purchase upsell to encourage shoppers to increase the quantity of their orders.

Here’s an example of what it looks like:

If a shopper clicks that button, they’ll be taken back to the cart, with the relevant deal applied. They can then repeat the checkout process to purchase the additional items.

If you want to use this placement option, set the Thank You Page Status drop-down to Active. You also get some additional options to control the placement and text of the deal.

You can place it at the top of the Thank You page, before the order details, or after the order details.

5. Create Additional Offers As Needed and Control Priority Ordering

To give you more flexibility, Merchant lets you create unlimited bulk discount offers. Each offer can have its own settings for the deal and the display options.

If you create multiple offers, you also might have some situations where multiple bulk discount offers apply to the same product(s).

Controlling which offer will take priority in these situations is really simple. All you need to do is drag and drop the offers and put them in the order you want them to take priority.

Offers with a lower number (higher in the list) will take priority over other offers. For example, in the screenshot below, the offer with the “1” priority would take priority over the offer with the “2” priority in any situation where both offers applied to the same product.

Video Walkthrough

For a step by step walkthrough of how to create bulk discounts in WooCommerce using Merchant Pro, you can watch the video below:

Start Offering WooCommerce Bulk Discounts Today

That wraps up our guide on how to use Merchant Pro to add flexible bulk discount deals to your WooCommerce store.

The best thing about Merchant, though, is that it’s not just bulk discounts. With Merchant’s 47+ modules, you can implement tons of other discounting strategies, along with accessing dozens of additional features to boost your revenue and improve your store’s shopping experience.

And remember, because Merchant uses a modular approach, it won’t load any of the features that you’re not using. This means that your store will stay lightweight and speedy, without any bloat.

If you’re ready to get started, purchase Merchant Pro today. Or, you can also click the Try Live Demo button on the landing page to try a full-featured demo before making your purchase.

Colin Newcomer

Colin Newcomer is a freelance writer for hire with a background in SEO and affiliate marketing. He helps clients grow their web visibility by writing primarily about digital marketing and WordPress.