Out of the box WooCommerce has always been quite limited in the types of promotional deals that store owners can do. This has been a hindrance to online stores compared to retail stores.
WooCommerce is an amazing platform when it comes to organizing your store but running BOGO (Buy One, Get One) style deals has thus far been impossible.
It’s changing though with the invention of tools like Advanced Coupons for WooCommerce which is a WooCommerce coupon plugin that lets you run these kinds of deals (and others) with ease.
This post will take you through how to run one of these types of deals in WooCommerce using this extension.
How To Run BOGO Deals In WooCommerce
Install Advanced Coupons and activate. It will add additional options to your coupons screen:
The BOGO Deals tab is the one we’re interested in, this is what the interface looks like:
You will see there are two sections, “trigger types” and “apply types”.
BOGO Trigger Types
There are three trigger types and they define how a BOGO deal should be “triggered”.
If you remember, in a BOGO type deal you have a “buy” part and a “get” part.
The trigger focuses on the “buy” part and defines when a cart is eligible to get the deal. After all, you can’t satisfy a BOGO deal without having the correct stuff in the cart.
Specific Products – this is the first kind where the coupon will look for a very specific product (or products) in the customer’s cart in an exact quantity. If it finds it, it will start looking to satisfy the deal (meaning, the deal has been triggered).
Combination of Products – the combination trigger type lets you expand on this by having the coupon look for any combination of products that you define. This might be a group of products that are all able to trigger a deal and in any combination with one another.
Product Category – the last trigger type works very similarly to the combination trigger type in that it’s letting the customer trigger a deal based on any combination of a group of products. In this case, it’s any combination of products from a specific category or categories.
BOGO Apply Types
The apply types work very similarly to the trigger types. In fact, they are even named the same.
When a deal is triggered, the system starts looking to fulfill the deal.
Specific Products – looks to apply (or give) a specific product in a specific quantity with the price discounting/override that you specify
Combination of Products – lets your customer choose from any of a list of products that you specify and gives you the ability to override/discount the price
Product Category – again, almost identical to the combination apply type, but with a product category or categories instead
This is best illustrated with an example:
Imagine the deal is “Buy 2 T-shirts, Get 1 T-shirt for FREE”
In this case, the BOGO deal gets triggered when it sees 2 or more t-shirts in the customer’s shopping cart. You might do this by using a Product Category trigger type with the t-shirt category.
In the second half of the deal, they get another t-shirt for free. If you use a Product Category apply type, the coupon will start looking for another product in the cart from the t-shirt category.
If it doesn’t find one right away, that is OK, the customer can just add another from the category.
Additionally, if the customer hasn’t supplied the product yet, Advanced Coupons gives the admin to write a message to the customer in that situation. It shows up as a WC notice on the cart.
Here’s how it looks on the front end for the customer:
Here the customer has triggered the deal, but not satisfied the “apply” (or “get”) part. They just need to tweak quantities or add another product from the t-shirt category to get their free shirt.
Now the product has been added you’ll notice that the cheapest one that can satisfy the deal gets the discount (in this case, a price override to 0.00).
You’ll also notice the totals table gets updated showing what the discounted was.
Wrapping Up
To wrap up, it’s now possible to do BOGO deals in WooCommerce.
Advanced Coupons is the plugin that was used in this tutorial. Download it here and use it on your store in minutes.
And BOGO is just the tip of the ice cream cone when it comes to its capabilities. But it certainly is a very good place to start and great type of deal you can now run on your WooCommerce store.
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