I like donuts. My favorite is the original glazed, followed closely by chocolate iced. My friend Sam’s favorite is the custard filled, and Eva likes the Cinnamon spiced. So usually when we head over to a donut shop, we get an assorted box of 6. So each one gets the ones they like. It’s cheaper as well, as opposed to individually buying 6.
Usually, many stores have such offers. They allow you to ‘Create your Own Box’, and select a fixed number of items you want to add to it. May it be for donuts, or chocolates (which is the most common use case), or magnets, cookies, beer bottles, and so on. Customers prefer such offers because they can choose the products they prefer and buy an assortment, instead of individually purchasing products. Store owners have an advantage because they do not have to worry about creating pre-assorted boxes, they hand over this option to the customer. And usually such offers are clubbed with a discount, to increase sales. The donut shop we go to, sells the box of 6, for the price of 5. That’s pretty cool.
So maybe you do not have a store at a physical location, rather one which is hosted online. And that’s fine. You could still attract customers with such offers, using the ‘Custom Product Boxes’ plugin for WooCommerce.
So, what is the ‘Custom Product Boxes’ extension? And how does it add a ‘Create Your Own’ functionality to your WooCommerce store?
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The Custom Product Boxes Extension
The Custom Product Boxes is an extension to your WooCommerce store, which adds a new type of product in your store. Basically, it adds a ‘Custom Product Box’ (or assorted box) product.
- For this product, you can set a quantity or decide the capacity of the box. For example, let’s say you wanted to allow customers to created an assorted box of 6 donuts. Then, you could set the quantity as 6.
- You can then decide which products customers can add to the box. So, for the assorted box of 6 donuts, you can set Original Glazed, Chocolate, Raspberry filled, and such, as products which can be added to the box.
- You can set the product price and shipping options as usual.
- Once you decide this, you can make the box available in your WooCommerce store.
- When a customer selects a box, he will be shown a list of products which he can then add to the box. So out of the available options he can choose 6. Any 6. These could be unique products, or multiple of some if preferred.
- The customer can make the purchase as usual.
So using the Custom Product Boxes extension, you can provide the same options to a customer, as you would in a physical store. Let’s take a look at other applications of the Custom Product Boxes Extension.
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Applications of Custom Product Boxes
Assorted Boxes- Create Your Own Box
This Custom Product Boxes extension can be used to create assortments of any kind. Say, for example, as mentioned before, assorted box of chocolates, assorted box of greeting cards, assorted pack of tools, etc. If you replace the word boxes with packs, you could create pack of assorted juice boxes, or assorted wine bottles. But apart from this, it also has a wider application.
Select Your Own Add-Ons
For example, just separate out the term ‘box’ or ‘pack’ for a while. These terms are restrictive. Instead, think of it as creating a single item. So say, for example, you allow customers to create their own pizza, by selecting any 3 pizza toppings. You could create a pizza as a custom product, and set the quantity to 3. You could then provide customers the option, to select the toppings.
Combo Offers- Buy any 2 for $29.99
Or say you sell apparel. You could use this extension to allow customers to select any three items at a discounted price. Or, along with the purchase, of say a shirt, you can allow customers, to select any add-on product (say a pair of shoes or trousers) at a fixed price.
Dynamic Product Pricing (Update – 16 July 2015)
The Custom Product Boxes has now been updated to include dynamic calculation of custom box. This means that the cost of the box will increase based on the cost of the item added to the box. Two options have been provided in the ‘Price Type‘ field for the dynamic price calculation feature.
The first is that of dynamic price calculation along with a base price for the product. Here, a price is defined for the custom product box. Over and above that, the price of individual items is appended to the total cost of the box.
The second option is that of per-product pricing without a base price. In this type of product, the customer will start off with a product that costs nothing by itself. Now, each time an item is added to box the price of that item is appended to the total cost of the product.
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The Custom Product Boxes plugin can be a great add-on to your WooCommerce store. Your customers can create and buy their own personalized assorted boxes. If you’re looking to add a similar functionality to your WooCommerce store, you can purchase the plugin right away. Do let me know your thoughts and feedback about this plugin, and features you’d like to see in future versions.
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