For WooCommerce wholesale store owners, it is essential to introduce new discounts and offers to encourage visitors to buy more. WooCommerce store owners use different discounting methods, yet the most common is offering Free Shipping on bulk orders or to bulk buyers.
Offering free shipping to bulk buyers can increase your revenue by encouraging buyers to order more. You can try this strategy on your eCommerce store if you also own a Wholesale store.
Fortunately, WooCommerce allows us to offer free shipping to our wholesale visitors in easy steps. We can quickly create a free shipping rule for bulk buyers in a few steps. We don’t require any third-party plugin to do this. Yet, to stop B2C users from getting this benefit, we must use a third-party plugin.
To help you with this, I have created a step-by-step guide on setting up free shipping for bulk shoppers. This tutorial will assist you in creating free shipping rules from scratch. Also, I’ll be attaching screenshots with each step to understand the steps better.
So, continue reading ahead and find out how to offer free shipping for bulk orders.
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Does Offering Free Shipping Increase Sales?
Shipping charges are too expensive for WooCommerce store owners. To cover shipping costs, store owners increase the shipping or product prices. According to a survey by AlixPartners, 36% of users stop shopping after observing that the shipping price is too much. Shipping cost is the most common cause behind abandoned shopping carts. Now, you can understand how shipping cost affects the users’ buying behavior.
Offering free shipping helps increase sales and retain customers for a long time. Not only that, but free shipping also helps reduce cart abandonment. Most of the time, buyers will end up checking out instead of leaving their goods in the cart.
According to a report by Business Insider, 58% of users used the free shipping option when buying products. Whereas a report by SwitchLabs states that sellers offering free shipping recorded a spike of 10% in sales.
Here are a few benefits of offering free shipping:
- Free shipping can also help increase the sales and revenue of your WooCommerce store.
- Another advantage of free shipping is improving the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).
- It helps in building loyalty with your customers. Your customers are more likely to come back and shop from you again.
These are the benefits of offering free shipping to bulk purchasers. Read the following section to check the use cases of free shipping.
Use Cases Of Free Shipping On Bulk Orders
Here are the use cases of free shipping on bulk orders.
- Offering free delivery on purchases of min XXX amount.
- Offering free shipping on buying X units of a particular product.
- Providing free shipping on buying at least XXX amount of products from a single category.
- Offering free shipment to B2B users on purchasing XXX amount of products.
- Allowing free shipping to B2B users only on buying XXX units of a particular product.
These are situations when you can use free shipping on your WooCommerce store.
How to Set Up Free Shipping For Bulk Orders
In this tutorial, I will be using the Dynamic Shipping and Payment plugin. This plugin offers excellent features to offer free shipping to bulk buyers easily.
Still, If you have not purchased or downloaded the plugin, you can download or buy the Dynamic Shipping and Payment plugin from the Woosuite official site.
Step 1. Create and Install the Woosuite Plugin
In the first step, we will install and activate the Woosuite plugin. This plugin will give access to our purchased plugin. After that, we will enable the Dynamic Shipping and Payment plugin by Woosuite.
To install the Woosuite plugin, download the Woosuite plugin zip file to your computer storage. You can download the plugin from your Woosuite dashboard. Now, follow the given steps to install the plugin to your WordPress dashboard:
- Go to the Plugin’s section, and click on Add New.
- Click on Upload Plugin.
- Choose the plugin file, and click on Upload.
- After uploading the plugin, click on Install Plugin.
Now, it will automatically start installing the plugin. After installing the plugin, it will notify you via a prompt. Here is the summarized process of doing this.
WordPress Dashboard: Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin > Choose File > Install Now
After installing the Woosuite Core plugin, you can find the Woosuite plugin in the Plugins section of your WordPress dashboard.
Now, we will need to Activate the Woosuite plugin. To Activate the plugin, visit the Plugins section, and look for the Woosuite Core plugin. Then, click on the Activate button.
WordPress Dashboard: Plugins > Woosuite Core > Activate
After Activating the plugin, you will get a new option in the WordPress tool menu called Woosuite.
In this step, we installed and activated the Woosuite plugin. We will now check to activate the Woosuite Core License. Follow the next step to activate the Woosuite license.
Step 2. Activate the Woosuite License
In this step, we will activate the Woosuite Core plugin license. So, let’s activate it. The process is quite simple. Yet, if you are already a Woosuite member and have activated the license, you can skip this step.
So, head to your WordPress tool menu and look for the Woosuite option. In the Woosuite menu, you will see different options.
In the Woosuite submenu, search for the Activate option. After finding it, click on the Activate option.
After clicking on the Activate option, it will redirect you to a new page. You have to enter your Woosuite license key on the new page and validate it.
In case you are figuring out how to get the license key, you would have received your license key via an email by Woosuite. Else, you can find the key from your Woosuite dashboard.
After finding the activation key, paste it into the given box. After that, click on the Activate License button.
We have now activated the Woosuite license. We will install and activate the Dynamic Shipping and Payment plugin easily. Follow the next step to install the Dynamic Shipping and Payment plugin on your WordPress dashboard.
Step 3. Install the Product Table Plugin
We will learn to install and activate the Dynamic Shipping and Payment plugin in this step. Follow the steps now.
You will see a Woosuite option in the WordPress toolbar. Search for the Addons option from the Woosuite submenu options and click on it.
After clicking on the Addons option, it will redirect you to a new page showing all the Woosuite plugins. You won’t get access to all the Woosuite plugins. You will only get access to plugins you have bought from the Woosuite official site.
I assume you have only bought the Dynamic Shipping and Payment plugin. So, search for Dynamic Shipping and Payment from the given plugins.
After that, click on the Install Now button to install the plugin to your WordPress dashboard.
You will notice that the Install Now button has been replaced with the Toggle. The toggle button lets us activate and deactivate the plugin. So click on the Toggle to activate the plugin.
Note: If you aren’t getting this option, refresh the page once.
We will enable the Free Shipping feature to offer free delivery to your bulk buyers in the next step. Read the next step to do that.
Step 4. Enable Free Shipping In WooCommerce
We will need to turn on this Free Shipping feature on our WooCommerce store to offer free shipping. To turn on the Free Shipping feature, head to your WooCommerce Settings.
In the WooCommerce settings, jump to the Shipping sections. Now, click on Add Shipping Zones.
Now, you will see a few fields in front of you. First, enter the Zone Name and Zone Region.
For example, I want to create free shipping for Indian Wholesale users only. So, I will name it Free Shipping In India.
Now, choose the Region to which you want to offer free shipping. For instance, I will select India from the Zone Region dropdown menu. You can choose according to your requirements.
After that, click on the Add Shipping Method button, and select Free Shipping from the dropdown menu.
Then, click on the Add Shipping Method button to create this rule.
Now, you will see the Free Shipping method in the Shipping Methods section. You will need to edit the Free Shipping method to enable this method. So, hover on the method and click on the Edit option.
Now, select the Free Shipping Requires option for a Minimum Order Amount. Then enter the Minimum Order Amount on which you want to offer the free shipping. For instance, if you’re going to offer free shipping on orders between $2000-$5000, enter $2000. You can add them according to your requirements. After that, click on Save Changes.
Step 5. Restrict Retail Users From Availing of Free Shipping
Now, we have enabled the Free Shipping feature. The next step is to restrict retail buyers from getting free shipping.
To do that, head over to the Dynamic Shipping and Payments plugin settings. You can visit the Dynamic Shipping and Payments plugin setting by clicking on the Shipping and Payment option in the Woosuite menu.
Then, click on Shipping Method.
You will see a page containing multiple options. We will configure them one by one.
Short Description: Enter the name you want to give to this rule. You can name it ‘Free Shipping in India.’ This won’t be visible to visitors; you can name it anything of your choice.
Exclude: We want to restrict retail buyers from getting free shipping on products. We will choose the ‘All Free Shipping Method Instances’ from the dropdown list to do that.
Add Condition: From the Add Condition dropdown menu, select Customer Role. In the next column, select the user role you want to eliminate. I will choose the Customer user role because I only want to give free shipping to wholesale users.
Then, click on Save Changes.
Now, we have made all the required changes. It’s time to check whether our Free Shipping rule is working fine or not. To check that, read the next section.
Final Results
I added products worth more than $2500 to my cart to check whether it’s working correctly. In addition, I’m currently logged in as a Wholesale user. As you can see in the given image, it is showing Free Shipping because my products are worth more than the value I set. This image shows that it’s working correctly.
Conclusion
We finally figured out how to set up free shipping for bulk orders or buyers. In this tutorial, we figured out how to enable the ‘Free Shipping’ option in WooCommerce. Besides, we figured out how to restrict retail users from getting free shipping on bulk orders. This is all about how to set up free shipping for bulk orders.
