Flash sales are mainly for making the customers a rush feeling to grab the products at minimum prices. Hence, all shoppers, even new shoppers, will make a quick visit to your store and get the products before the sale ends!
As the name suggests, this offer comes like a flash and ends quickly. We can’t even see 24 hours of flash sales anywhere. If it lasts up to 24 hours, it doesn’t make sense to call it a flash sale, isn’t it?
So, what is the strategy behind this flash sale, and how you can make this work in your store? Let us check that in this article. So here, we will discuss how to set up flash sale pricing and discounts for your WooCommerce store.
What is a Flash Sale?
This kind of discounts and sales can be seen mostly in Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. Usually, it ends within 2-3 hours. Maybe customers will receive a notification of the flash sale with an urgency message like ‘Grab it before the sale ends!’, or ‘Only 30 minutes left to take your favorite shirt’ and so on.
Another way is, customers are notified through emails if your store doesn’t have an app. Nowadays more flash sales are announced through notifications. Basically, the shop owners sell the products at the lowest price possible in these sales.
No shop owners provide a discount without seeing a plan to increase the sale, isn’t it?
So check out the benefits you will get from the flash sale from the shop owner’s side.
Benefits of Flash Sales
The first and foremost benefit of flash sale pricing is increasing sales. Here you can mainly focus on regular customers and potential customers. That is, your regular customers may be waiting for a better price drop to grab their favorite products, which are wishlisted or abandoned in the cart. So notifying them will result in a better conversion rate. The choosing of products can be determined using the analytics of your store, like which product is mostly viewed by the customers and the uptime.
Other benefits include the giving away of products that did not have many sales as expected. If you give away those products at a minimum price, you can stock new items. These sales will attract new customers as well, if they find products at very cheap prices compared to other competitors.
Do Flash Sales Go Wrong?
Yes, it depends on your store and the products you are selling. And even some minor mistakes from your side can lead to the opposite result. How do they go wrong?
There are many ways it could go wrong. Sending too many emails and notifications regarding the sales may irritate your customers. If your frequent flash sale notifications make their inbox run out of space, they will unsubscribe you or delete the account or even block your mails. So, plan the flash sale once in a while, and do not give frequent sales. This may lead to a loss of the reputation of your brand in customers’ minds.
And another point is, select your customers like you select products to be eligible for the sales. That is, send the notifications and the flash sales to selected customers, subscribers, or user roles in your store. And make sure only one email is sent to a user regarding the specific flash sale. Also, try not to send the email to the customer who already purchased the products as much as possible.
According to customers’ psychology, if they see the offers for a product they grabbed before with or without the exclusive offers, they may lose interest in your shop and products. All customers would like to believe they got an exclusive offer. Each customer’s happiness and satisfaction is really important.
Always remember, do not lose your value by giving too many discounts frequently or daily.
How Can You Boost the Sales in Flash Sales?
There are small tips and tricks you can consider when planning to apply flash sale pricing in your store.
- Sell your products to competitors’ customers: If any customers see a price drop for the same product in any other store compared to their regular store, they will definitely jump to the shop which has more offers. This strategy can be applied to market your flash sales by targeting competitors’ potential customers. You can put your marketing efforts through Google Ads and social media.
- Make a fake rush: This is what we all see in online stores mostly. Making an urgency felt by the store owners’ in terms of the stock and time. Customers will run to buy their favorite products if they see a timer of the sale. If they see, “Only 2 left”, or “30 minutes left to end the sale”, it triggers a quick decision making in customers. Within a few seconds, they will purchase the products!
- Run Google Ads: Google shopping ads are quite popular and we all will have a look at the shopping ads to know the availability of a product at different prices. If you are planning to run Google Ads, it will be one of the best decisions if and only if you choose the right keywords and target the potential customers in the right locations. The same platform can be used to market your flash sales. But make sure, your flash sale ads run only for a short period of time with the right keywords.
- Better pricing and shipping strategy: Plan your pricing by setting up a price that is a little bit greater than the maximum price at which you can sell the product. And always plan the shipping of the orders as you will receive a bulk number of orders in a short time duration. And plan the return and cancellation processes as well.
Hope you got an idea about flash sale pricing. Now let us get down to set it up in your WooCommerce store.
No need for any concerns regarding the configuration if your site is built with the WooCommerce platform.
You only require a robust pricing plugin for your store to integrate the flash sale pricing in your store. Which WooCommerce pricing plugin is apt for applying this flash sale pricing?
Set Up Flash Sale Pricing and Discounts with ELEX WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing and Discounts Plugin
ELEX WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing and Discounts plugin is one of the best dynamic pricing and discounts plugins in the market. It helps you to apply 9 different discount rules by default. Along with that, you can add a handful of advanced features such as offers for specific user roles, individual users, purchase history of the customers, and so on. To explore all available features in this plugin, refer to an article: Everything You Need to Know About WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing.
As I have already mentioned, there are 9 default discount rules and you can mix and match other features and options to make your offers more interesting and captivating to potential customers.
Here, to demonstrate the flash sale pricing to you, I am choosing ‘Product Rules’ in this plugin.
Product Rules
Product rules are mainly used to apply percentage, flat, or fixed price discounts to individual products, all products under a specific category, and all products in the customer’s shopping cart based on the quantity, weight, and price of the products.
Before the setup process, go to its product page, subscribe to the plugin, and install it. To know more about the configuration steps, you may refer to its documentation.
After installing it, go to Dashboard > WooCommerce > Dynamic Pricing > Product Rules.
In the above screenshot, I have chosen 3 individual products and added a minimum quantity as 3 and 25% as a discount. If a customer purchases a minimum of 3 quantities of these products individually, they will get a 25% discount.
This is an example. You may change the discounts according to your requirements. And you can also add other discount rules accordingly.
Then go to the Allowed Roles & Date tab. There you can add the user roles for whom this discount must be applied if required. But here our main goal is to set up the flash sale.
Since you know flash sales will basically live 2 – 3 hours, you can set the time on the option to set the commencement of the offer as well as the expiry of the offer. When you choose the date, you can choose the time as well. Check the below screenshot.
You can check the highlighted parts in the above screenshot wherein I have added the time of the flash sale. After saving the rule, this offer will be available for 9 – 12 for the customers. If you have chosen the user roles, the offer will be available for the users who come under those user roles exclusively.
The offer will be displayed on the cart page when a customer adds more than 3 items of any of the products are as in the below screenshot.
Here, the customer has been added 4 Happy Ninja Hoodies, which satisfies the product rule we have set. Hence a 25% discount has been applied to each product price. This offer will be available for 3 hours as a flash sale. You can trigger proper notifications or emails to the customers accordingly.
To sum up,
Using ELEX WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing and Discounts plugin, you can set up flash sale pricing easily using the option to set the discount duration. This is the easiest and convenient way to apply flash sale pricing. You can also schedule the flash sale at a future date in accordance with your requirements.