How to Add Live Sales Notifications in WooCommerce

Trying to add live sales notifications to WooCommerce?

Sales notifications can be a great way to add social proof and build trust with your shoppers. However, WooCommerce doesn’t offer any built-in solution for sales notifications.

In this post, you’re going to learn an easy way to set up real sales notifications that build trust with customers. With the Merchant plugin, you’ll be able to do this without needing any technical knowledge.

Here’s an example of what they might look like, though you’ll get tons of options for controlling how they look and function:

An example of WooCommerce live sales notifications from the Merchant plugin

In addition to displaying sales notifications for individual purchases with Merchant, you can also display notifications for overall sales counts, individual add to carts, overall add to carts, and product views.

You can also fully customize the design and content of the notification box, including choosing pre-made templates for certain holidays.

For example, here’s an add to cart notification using a Christmas template design.

An example of add to cart notifications

In addition to all those different notification types and design options, the Merchant plugin also gives you plenty of other options to customize how your notifications work:

  • Choose to hide notifications on mobile or desktop devices.
  • Manually exclude certain products from ever appearing in notifications.
  • Control the timing for everything, including when notifications should appear, how long between notifications, and more.
  • Choose how many notifications to display during a user’s session, along with whether to randomize those notifications.
  • Choose the time period for each notification type.
  • Set minimums before displaying overall sale counts.
  • Customize the text for every notification, including using dynamic tags to dynamically insert information.

In this post, I’ll show you how everything works and how you can have real sales notifications working on your store in just a few minutes.

A Quick Introduction to the Merchant Plugin

As I showed you in the introduction, the Merchant plugin gives you a lot of different options for setting up live sales notifications on your WooCommerce store. You can do all of this using the Recent Sales Notifications module in Merchant Pro.

One of the really nice things about the Merchant plugin, though, is that it’s not just a WooCommerce sales notification plugin.

Instead, it’s actually a modular toolkit of 47+ different features designed to boost your store’s revenue and create a better shopping experience for your customers.

These features are 100% modular, which means that Merchant will only load the features that you are actively using. That way, you keep your store as lightweight as possible.

You’re totally free to just use Merchant to add WooCommerce sales notifications. However, you’ll probably find at least a few other modules that can improve your store in various ways.

You can browse all of the features here, but here are just a few examples of the different types of modules that you’ll find:

How to Set Up WooCommerce Sales Notifications Using Merchant

Now, let’s get into our step-by-step guide on how to set up live sales notifications on WooCommerce using the Merchant plugin.

You do not need any technical knowledge and you can have everything up and running in less than 15 minutes.

1. Install the Merchant Pro Plugin On Your Site

To get started, you’ll want to install the Merchant plugin on your site.

While there is a free version of Merchant available at WordPress.org, you’ll need Merchant Pro to access the Recent Sales Notifications module that lets you set up live sales notifications.

You can purchase Merchant Pro by clicking this link. Licenses start at just $79 and include access to every single module, which means you can get a lot of additional value beyond just live sales notifications.

Once you’ve made your purchase, you can download Merchant Pro from the aThemes website account area and then install it on your site.

Here are detailed instructions for installing Merchant Pro if you’d like a helping hand.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, I also recommend adding your license key to Merchant Pro so that you can more easily update the plugin and/or set up automatic updates. You can do this by going to Merchant → Settings in your WordPress dashboard and using the License Activation box.

2. Activate the Recent Sales Notifications Module

As I mentioned earlier, the Merchant plugin uses a 100% modular approach, which is what allows you to keep your store as lightweight as possible. That is, Merchant will only load the specific features that you choose to enable on your store.

So, before you can start using your WooCommerce sales notifications, you first need to enable the Recent Sales Notifications module on your site.

To access the module, go to Merchant → Dashboard. Then, select the Recent Sales Notifications module, which will be listed under the “Build Trust” category.

Open the recent sales notifications module

This should open the module settings area. To enable it, click the blue Enable button.

Enable the WooCommerce live sales notifications module

3. Configure Your Site’s Sales Notifications

Once you’ve enabled the module, you’re ready to jump into the settings and configure everything according to your preferences.

You’ll find all of these settings in the module’s settings area. You’ll also see a live preview on the right side of the interface, which lets you see how some of your choices will affect the frontend design.

Module settings area

Let’s go through the different types of settings…

Timing Settings

The Timing Settings let you control a few different timing aspects for your sales notifications:

  • Seconds before the first notification is shown – when a visitor lands on your store, Merchant will wait this number of seconds to display the first notification.
  • Time on screen (seconds) – this is how long an individual sale notification will be displayed on the screen.
  • Delay between notifications (seconds) – once the first notification disappears, this is how long Merchant will wait to display the next notification (and so on for subsequent notifications).
  • Notifications per session – this is the maximum number of individual sale notifications that will be displayed to a visitor during that visitor’s active browsing session.
Timing settings

Notifications Control

The Notifications Control settings let you choose which types of notifications you want to display.

In total, Merchant gives you the option to use five different types of notifications:

  1. Recent Purchases – this will show individual product purchases. For example, “Colin from Philadelphia purchased the Blue Widget”.
  2. Sales Count – this will show the overall number of orders for a certain product within a certain time period. For example, “14 customers purchased this product within the past week”.
  3. Cart Summary – this will show the overall number of shoppers who have added the product to their carts within a certain time period. For example, “27 people added this product to their cart today”.
  4. Individual Cart Adds – this will show a real-time notification when an individual shopper has added the item to their cart. For example, “Colin from Philadelphia just added this product to their cart”.
  5. Visitors Count – this will show the overall number of customers who have viewed this product within a certain time period. For example, “275 have viewed this product today”.

You could choose to use a single notification type or you can mix and match multiple notification types according to your preferences.

Each notification type gets its own settings section where you can do two important things:

  1. You can disable that type of notification if you don’t want to use it on your store.
  2. If you choose to enable a specific type of notification, you can configure its behavior.

You can expand these settings by clicking the accordion icon.

Notification types

I won’t explain every single setting option for each notification type, but here are some quick rundowns of the options that are available.

Recent Purchases
Recent sale notifications

Note – when you’re customizing the text content of any notification type, you can use dynamic tags to insert information about the customer location, number of views/purchases, and so on.

Sales Count
Sales count notifications
Cart Summary
Cart summary notifications
Individual Cart Adds
Individual add to cart notifications
Visitors Count
Visitor view count notifications

Custom Settings

The Custom Settings area includes a few different types of settings that you can use to get more control over your sales notifications.

Here are your options:

  • Hide on Mobile – this will hide notifications for mobile visitors. Because mobile screens are much smaller, you might not want to use screen real estate for sales notifications.
  • Hide on Desktop – this will hide notifications for desktop visitors.
  • Shuffle Notifications – this will randomize the order of the notifications, which ensures that each customer sees them in a different order.
  • Hide product image – this will hide the product image/thumbnail from appearing in the notification banners.
  • Hide product name from notifications – this will hide product names from appearing in the notification banners.
  • Product exclusion – this lets you exclude individual products from ever appearing in notifications. If you enable this toggle, you can search for those products by name.
Custom settings area

Look and Feel

The Look and Feel settings let you control the location, layout, and design of your sales notifications.

To start, the Slide from drop-down lets you choose where sales notifications should appear from, with four different options:

  1. Bottom Left
  2. Bottom Right
  3. Top Left
  4. Top RIght

Below that, you can use the Select layout options to choose from four different preset layouts for the notification box.

If you choose a different layout, you should see the preview on the right update to use that layout. This lets you compare how the different layouts look.

Below that, you can use the Notification box width, Notification corner radius, and Product image radius settings to manually tweak your chosen layout if needed.

Basic look and feel settings

Finally, you can choose your notification box theme and customize it if needed. You have two options:

  1. Custom – you can set up your own custom theme by choosing which colors you want to use.
  2. Template – you can choose from 8+ premade layout themes, while still getting additional options to customize the design according to your preferences.

You can make your choice by using the Choose theme radio buttons.

Here’s what it looks like to create a Custom theme:

Custom style

Here’s what it looks like to use a Template:

Template style

With the template, you can find premade templates for popular holidays such as Christmas and Halloween. Or, you can always upload your own custom background image that’s specific to your unique use case.

4. Test Your Sales Notifications

Once you’ve saved all your settings, your sales notifications should be live on your WooCommerce store.

To make sure that everything is working, you can open the frontend of your store in an incognito window and verify that you’re seeing notifications as you expect to.

Remember – Merchant uses real/accurate notifications. So, if you’re working on a development store that doesn’t have any shopper activity yet, you might need to create some dummy orders or add some products to your cart to trigger the notifications.

An example of WooCommerce live sales notifications from the Merchant plugin

Set Up WooCommerce Sales Notifications Today

Live sales notifications are a great way to add social proof to your WooCommerce store.

With the Merchant plugin, you can easily add all different types of real sale notifications including:

  • Recent purchases
  • Overall sales counts
  • Cart summaries
  • Individual add to carts
  • Visitors to products

You could choose to only display a single type of notification. Or, you can mix and match as many different types as you want.

Plus, in addition to the WooCommerce sales notifications module in Merchant, you also get access to 47+ other features that you can use to improve your store. And remember – thanks to its modular approach, Merchant will keep your store lightweight and fast by only loading the specific modules that you choose to enable.

If you’re ready to get started, purchase the Merchant Pro plugin today.

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