Are you trying to figure out how to create Buy X, Get Y offers on your WooCommerce store?
While Buy X, Get Y deals can be great for boosting your store’s revenue, WooCommerce doesn’t include any built-in functionality for adding these types of offers. You can fix that with the Merchant plugin.
In this post, you’ll learn how to use Merchant to set up flexible Buy X, Get Y deals that look something like this:
Or like this – it’s totally up to you!
To give you more flexibility, you get detailed control over all the important aspects of your deals:
- Product targeting – you can apply the deal to specific trigger products, categories of products, or even every single product on your store (with options to easily exclude certain products if needed).
- Quantity control – you can fully customize the quantity of an item that the shopper must purchase to get the deal, along with the quantity of the product that they receive. For example, you can do
“Buy 1, Get 1”, “Buy 3, Get 2”, “Buy 4, Get 4”, and literally any combination of numbers. - Discount control – you can give people any level of fixed or percentage discount, even making products free. For example, you can do “Buy 1, Get 1 Free”, “Buy 2, Get 1 50% Off”, “Buy 1, Get 1 $10 Off”, and so on.
- User conditions – you can let every shopper access the deal or restrict it to certain users or user roles.
You can also create unlimited deals and use simple drag-and-drop priority ordering to control which deal should take priority in any situation where multiple deals apply to the same product(s).
Beyond that, you get options to promote your deals in four different locations – the product single page, cart page, checkout page, and thank you page. You’ll also get options to customize the text and styling of all these elements.
Ready to learn how it works? Here’s your full guide on setting up Buy X, Get Y deals with the Merchant plugin…
A Quick Introduction to the Merchant Plugin
Before I get to the full tutorial, I first want to quickly share some key details about the Merchant plugin.
In the intro, I talked about all of the options that you get for setting up all kinds of different Buy X, Get Y deals.
Merchant is not just a Buy X, Get Y plugin, though. It’s actually a toolkit of 47+ different modular features that you can use to boost your store’s revenue and improve your customers’ shopping experiences.
For example, there are a bunch of other discounting models that let you implement other discounting strategies such as bulk/tiered discounts, free gifts, storewide sales, product bundles, and more.
There are also lots of other modules to improve other parts of your store, including sticky add to cart, optimized checkout, real-time product search, waitlists, countdown timers, frequently bought together products, quick view, advanced product reviews, sale tags, wishlists, and more.
You can browse all of the modules here, or spin up a fully functioning demo site by clicking the Try Live Demo button on the Merchant homepage.
Most importantly, Merchant’s modular approach means that it won’t load any features that you haven’t specifically activated. This helps keep your store lightweight and loading fast by only loading exactly what’s needed.
While you can just use Merchant for Buy X, Get Y deals, you’ll probably find some of the other modules useful, which means that it can help you build a better store while also eliminating the need to use other WooCommerce plugins.
How to Create a WooCommerce Buy X, Get Y Deal
Now, let’s get into the full step-by-step guide on how to create your first Buy X, Get Y deal with the Merchant plugin…
1. Install and Activate the Merchant Pro Plugin
To get started, you’ll want to install and activate the Merchant Pro plugin on your store.
While there is a free version of Merchant at WordPress.org, you’ll need Merchant Pro to access the Buy X, Get Y module.
Merchant Pro licenses start at $79, which gives you access to all 47+ modules in the plugin. You can purchase your license here.
Once you’ve made your purchase, install and activate both the free Merchant plugin from WordPress.org and Merchant Pro on your site.
After activating the plugins, I also recommend adding your Merchant Pro license key so that your store can benefit from automatic update notifications. You can do this by going to Merchant → Settings and using the License Activation box.
2. Activate the Buy X, Get Y Module
As I mentioned in the beginning, Merchant uses a modular approach to keep your store lightweight and loading quickly.
Before you can create your first deal, you first need to enable the Buy X, Get Y module:
- Open your WordPress dashboard.
- Go to Merchant → Dashboard.
- Click on the Buy X, Get Y module to open its settings area. It should be listed under Boost Revenue.
In the module settings, you can then click the blue Enable button to enable the module.
3. Create Your First Buy X, Get Y Deal
Once you enable the module, you can set up your first Buy X, Get Y deal by editing the default offer that Merchant creates.
You’ll find this listed under the Offers column – you can expand the accordion if you don’t see the full settings area.
Let’s go through setting up your deal…
Choose Which Product(s) Will Trigger the Deal (Buy X)
To start things off, you can choose which products will trigger the deal. That is, the “X” products in the “Buy X” part of the deal.
You can choose from three different triggers, depending on how broadly you want to apply the deal:
- All products – every single product in your store will trigger the deal. If you select this, you also get two options to manually exclude certain products if needed. You can use the Exclude Products option to exclude individual products by name or the Exclude Categories option to exclude entire categories of products.
- Specific products – only the individual products (or product variants) that you select will trigger the deal. You can choose products by searching for them by name.
- Specific categories – any product in the categories that you select will trigger the deal. You also get an Exclude Products option that lets you then manually exclude individual products if needed.
Below that, you can choose the minimum Quantity that shoppers must purchase to trigger the deal. For example, if you set this to “2”, a shopper would need to purchase at least two of an eligible product to receive the “Get Y” part of the deal.
Choose the Product(s)/Discounts That Shoppers Receive (Get Y)
Next, you can choose the “Get Y” part of the deal, including the product and discount that shoppers will get when they meet the “Buy X” trigger.
First, you can use the Customer Gets option to search for the product that shoppers will get. This could be the same product as the trigger product or it could be completely different – it’s totally up to you.
Below that, there’s a checkbox for Display the offer on all products in the bundle. By default, your Buy X, Get Y deal will only display/be promoted when shoppers are interacting with the trigger product(s) (the “Buy X” products). However, if you check this box, Merchant will promote the deal on all products in the deal, including both the “Buy X” and “Get Y” products.
Next, you can choose the Quantity of the product/discount that shoppers receive. For example, if you want to create a deal like “Buy 3, Get 2 free”, you could enter “2” as the quantity.
Finally, you can select the discount that shoppers will receive on those products. You can choose from two different discount types:
- Percentage Discount
- Fixed Discount – the fixed discount applies to each item. So if you set it as $10 with a quantity of four, shoppers would get a total of $40 off ($10 per item times four items).
If you want to create a “Buy X, Get Y Free” deal, you can set the Percentage Discount equal to “100”. For partial discounts – e.g. “Buy 1 Table, Get $25 Off 1 Chair”, you can enter any percentage or fixed discount.
In the screenshot below, the deal is configured as “Buy two tables, get four chairs for 25% off”.
Set Up User Conditions
By default, every single shopper will be able to take advantage of the Buy X, Get Y offer. However, if you want to restrict access to the deal, Merchant lets you apply user conditions using the User Condition drop-down:
- All Users – every single shopper can access the deal.
- Selected Users – only the specific user accounts that you select can access the deal.
- Specific Roles – any user with one of the user roles that you select can access the deal.
Customize Buy X, Get Y Deal Display
To help you promote your Buy X, Get Y deals as optimally as possible, Merchant gives you four potential locations to display the deal:
- Product Single Page
- Cart Page
- Checkout Page
- Thank You Page
By default, Merchant will only display the deal on the product single page. You can disable the product single page if you want, but I recommend leaving this turned on as it’s one of the most effective ways to promote your deals.
If you want to use the other placement options, all you need to do is enable them and then configure the settings.
Let’s go through all four placement options, including screenshots of each location so that you know what it might look like.
Product Single Page
By default, Merchant will display the deal on the single product page of products to which the deal applies.
It looks something like this:
In the Product Single Page settings, you can customize the location of the box, all of the text, and the colors.
For the location, you can choose from two preset options:
- After add to cart
- Before add to cart
If you want more control, you can also manually place it using a shortcode. You could add the shortcode to the product description box, using your theme’s hooks, or directly to your theme’s template files.
If you want to use manual shortcode placement, you’ll first need to enable the Use shortcode toggle at the bottom of the module settings area. Then, you can use the [merchant_module_buy_x_get_y] shortcode to control the placement.
Cart Page
For another option, Merchant lets you display the deal on the shopping cart page when shoppers have added relevant products to their carts.
If you want to use this placement, change the Cart Page Status to Active and then use the options to configure the text of the offer if needed.
Checkout Page
In addition to the cart page, Merchant also lets you display the deal on the checkout page.
Here’s an example of what it might look like, though the exact placement will depend on the location that you choose and how your theme displays the checkout page.
If you want to use this, set the Checkout Page Status to Active and then use the options to configure the text of the offer.
Thank You Page
Lastly, Merchant also lets you promote your deal on the order thank you page, which displays after the shopper completes their order. This lets you promote your deal as a sort of post-purchase upsell, which can be an effective strategy for some types of Buy X, Get Y deals.
If you enable this placement, shoppers will see a promotion box like this after they submit their orders:
If they click the Add to Cart button, it will take them directly to their shopping cart, with the correct deal conditions applied. Shoppers can then complete the checkout process again to benefit from the deal.
If you want to use this placement, set the Thank You Page Status to Active. You can then use the other settings to control the text of the offer, along with the location on the thank you page where you want to display the offer.
4. Create Additional Buy X, Get Y Deals and Adjust Priority (Optional)
With Merchant, you can create unlimited Buy X, Get Y deals, each with their own product/discount and placement settings.
To create another deal, all you need to do is click the Add New Offer button.
If you create multiple deals, you might also run into situations where multiple deals apply to the same product(s).
To control which deal should be active in those situations, Merchant lets you use drag-and-drop priority ordering. In any situation where multiple offers apply to the same product, the offer that’s higher in the priority list (with a lower number) will take priority over the other offers.
To change the order of the priority list, you can drag and drop offers by clicking and holding the hamburger icon.
Create Your First WooCommerce Buy X, Get Y Deal Today
That wraps up our guide on how to create Buy X, Get Y WooCommerce deals with the Merchant plugin.
With Merchant, you can create pretty much any type of Buy X, Get Y deal imaginable, which gives you a lot of flexibility for implementing your discounting strategies.
Plus, you can also use Merchant for a lot more than just Buy X, Get Y deals. You’ll get access to 47+ total modules at no extra cost, which means you’ll get a lot of extra value from the plugin.
While it does offer a lot of features, Merchant also uses a totally modular approach, which keeps your store loading fast by not loading the code for any features that you’re not actively using.
If you’re ready to get started, purchase Merchant Pro today.
