How To Create WooCommere Category Discounts? (No Plugin Required)

This article explains how to create category-based coupons in WooCommerce. It provides step-by-step instructions to guide users in implementing WooCommerce category discounts on their website. Both default WooCommerce features and a free coupon plugin solution are covered.

WooCommerce supports discounts in several ways, including product-specific discounts and category-based coupons.

While WooCommerce allows category-based coupon creation by default, the control over coupon usage and discounts is limited, which can sabotage your profits.

To overcome this, Smart Coupons for WooCommerce offers advanced features to create more flexible and specific WooCommerce category discounts. And best of all, you can unlock the category discount features using just the free version of the plugin.

Category-based discounts in WooCommerce are promotional offers applied to specific product categories of your store. Instead of setting a discount on specific products, you will now be able to set percentage or fixed discounts to an entire category, like clothing or electronics.

Besides this, offering discounts based on category enables store owners to encourage bulk purchases, clear out dead stock, or promote during seasonal campaigns. These discounts applies automatically whenever products from the chosen category are put in the cart.

Product category discounts can be set up in WooCommerce without needing external tools. However, the customizations available for this are limited. Let’s see how we can create category-specific discounts.

Step 1: Create a WooCommerce Coupon

• Navigate to Marketing > Coupons in your WooCommerce dashboard. Click on Add Coupon to create a new one.
• Enter a coupon name and add a coupon description if you want.
• Go to Coupon data > General section. Then, select the type of discount you want and enter the discount amount.

Step 2: Setting Category-based Usage Restrictions

• Go to the Usage restriction tab.
• In the Product categories field, specify the categories you want to include for the discount. To exclude certain categories, use the Exclude categories field.
• Click on Publish to activate the coupon.

The free WooCommerce Smart Coupons plugin supports additional functionalities like minimum and maximum quantity criteria, AND and OR conditions, and more.

Check out our video tuturial on how to set up coupons and discounts for specific categories in WooCommerce.

To create coupons and discounts for specific product categories, follow these steps:

• Install and activate the free WooCommerce Smart Coupons plugin on the store.
• Go to Smart Coupons > Add Coupon. This is where you’ll configure the category-specific discount rules.
• Next, go to the Usage restriction tab and enable the following category-based coupon confugurations.
  • Individual quantity restriction – Enable the checkbox to set minimum and maximum quantity restrictions for individual categories. The coupon applies only if the cart meets the specific quantity rules for product categories.
  • Category condition – Choose Any from the below section to apply the coupon if a product belonging to any of the listed category appears in the cart. Choose All from below section to apply the coupon if all product categories listed appear in the cart.
  • Min. & Max. Quantity – For each category, define a minimum and maximum quantity of items that need to be in the cart for the coupon to be eligible.

Let’s walk through an example of setting up basic discount rules for specific product categories. You want to create a discount that applies only when the customer has products from both the clothing and pants categories in their cart.

Additionally, let’s say you want the coupon to apply exclusively to products in the clothing category, excluding its subcategory shirts. Here’s how to configure the rule:

This cart will become eligible for this coupon only if it houses items both from clothing (minimum 2 and maximum 6) and pants (minimum 1 and maximum 2). The coupon will ignore any shirts added to the cart and only provide discounts for the parent (clothing) category.

Let’s look how it reflects in the cart.

Here, both products belong to the category ‘clothing’. The brown pants are a member of both categories (clothing – mother, pants – child); therefore, the two minimum clothing products are satisfied. And the category discount is applied.

However, if the product had exceeded the minimum or maximum quantity limit, the cart would have become ineligible for the coupon.

Or when a product from the excluded category is added to the cart, that product will be excluded from the discount calculation.

The WebToffee Smart Coupons plugin premium version is a complete solution for all your coupon needs. The plugin lets you develop any kind of coupon, be that may be a cart abandonment coupon or a signup discount coupon.

Some of the key features of this WooCommerce coupon plugin include,

• Advanced Buy One Get One deals
• Sign up coupons
• Purchase history-based coupons
• Abandoned cart recovery coupons and automated emails
• Discounts to reward repeated purchases
• Store credit vouchers
• Purchasable gift cards
• Bulk-generate coupons
• Set up banners with count-down timers

Applying coupons based on categories has more potential than you might think for boosting your store’s sales and growth. When combined with other features offered by the plugin, this strategy can significantly impact your store’s performance.

We hope the steps provided have helped you understand how to implement this feature in your WooCommerce store.