How to Set Up WooCommerce Product Availability and Expiry Dates

 

Any businessman worth his salt knows the importance of presenting featured products in their store from time to time.

And, this stands doubly true for e-store owners, especially on WooCommerce, as the need to create offers that invite and retain customer interest is greater here.

We previously discussed how creating limited edition products in WooCommerce can increase visitor interest and sales.

So, today, let’s take a look at you can create a sense of urgency among your buyers by setting up product availability and product expiration dates on WooCommerce.

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Setting Up WooCommerce Product Availability

WooCommerce lets you track product availability intuitively, depending on the number of items present in the store’s inventory. And, it also has an option to enable ‘hiding the product’, when it runs out of stock.

However, when you wish to set up products with limited shelf-life or season specials, you might want to schedule their availability. In doing so, you can make the product available for purchase only for a limited time and unavailable for the rest (although it might yet be in stock).

You might even want to limit the product availability such that it is taken off the air, once a particular number of sales for the day are reached.

This is because scheduling and limiting your product availability can help in:

• Increasing FOMO and inducing a sense of urgency among your buyers.

And, taking advantage of this consumer psychology can help you increase your sales significantly.

But, WooCommerce, by default, does not come with built-in functionality to this end. Hence, a Scheduling plugin is invaluable here.

And, the process for setting up product availability is simplified to:

• Set up the Product and the Product type as usual.
• Install a Product Availability plugin
• Add the Start and End Display timer with the scheduling plugin.
• Select the days of the week when you want the product to be displayed (if needed).

And, here’s the bare minimum you can achieve with any Product Availability plugin:

• Schedule your product or product category for a limited time every day – by date & time and can also be made available for hours or a few days.
• Add a ticking frontend countdown timer to instill FOMO and evoke a sense of urgency.
• You can also automatically hide the unavailable or out-of-stock products.
• Plus, you can display a custom message to inform your customers about the product’s unavailability.

[su_note]Recommended Read: 9 Best WooCommerce Product Availability Plugins.[/su_note]

Setting Up WooCommerce Product Expiry

Setting up the product availability is the first half of creating a limited edition product, setting up the product expiration date is the second.

You can set a product expiry date to spur your customers to purchase the product before it becomes unavailable.

Much like setting up the product availability, creating an Expiry Date for your product can also be achieved in 4 simple steps:

• Set up the Product and the Product Type
• Install the Product Availability plugin
• Set a Product Expiration Date until which the product will be visible for sale on your site
• Set a Product Expiration message for a single product or for the entire Shop Page, or remove the product from the shop once it expires

Once you publish this Product, it will be displayed as available until the given expiry date.

Using a WooCommerce Product Scheduling Plugin

Now, while there are plenty of WooCommerce Product Availability plugins out there, but, we recommend the WISDM Scheduler extension.

This is because:

• It comes with tons of powerful features developed by Certified Woo Experts.
• The support team is incredible with a great track record of resolving queries within 24 hours.
• And, with over 1300 downloads, the plugin is rated at a near-perfect score of 4.9/5.

The WISDM Scheduler is a popular and robust plugin that helps you set up Product Availability and Expiry dates. It’s pretty simple in its operation and lets you specify the time, day, and date range for product purchase availability.

Some other plugin features include:

• Bulk scheduling of Products according to Category or distinct product selection
• Variations of variable products can be selectively hidden, just as in the case of simple products
• Hidden products’ Product Page status is changed to ‘Draft’ to suspend visibility
• Set opening-closing hours for your store to align purchases with your business hours
• Notify buyers about products once they’re back in stock to drive more sales
• Intuitive selection of latest added schedule, overriding any previously defined schedules
• User-friendly Date Picker, with a Calendar display format

WISDM Scheduler is fairly simple to set up, use and an easy yet efficient way of adding the product scheduling functionality to your website.

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The Final Take

Creating limited edition products on your WooCommerce store generates a sense of urgency among your customers, provided your products are interesting enough to capture and hold their attention. This idea can even be extended to selling custom products only during a given season, instead of all through the year.

A scheduling plugin is of great help here, in setting up individual product availability and expiry dates to create that sense of anticipation in your shoppers. When appropriately marketed, this simple, but useful functionality can be an asset to your site, paying rich dividends.

Know of any other way which can be used to limit product availability? Comment to let us know!