The two surefire ways of making sure that your customers return time and again to your WooCommerce store are putting products up for sale or making them available for a limited time period.
However, when we come to exclusive products that you might want to sell, a sale is not such a great idea. What you can do instead is promote them as featured products, available in a limited edition format. This creates the urgency you need, without having to compromise on your net profit.
Let the mad scramble ensue!
There is a slight catch though. WooCommerce, being fond of extremes, does not let you schedule products for a specific amount of time. It is either, show them if they’re available or hide them if they’re not. This is where a scheduling plugin like WooCommerce Scheduler is worth its virtual weight in gold!
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WooCommerce Scheduler – Schedule Limited Edition Products in Your Woo Store
WooCommerce Scheduler is extremely straightforward in its operation. Once the plugin is installed, every Product page has a dialogue box that lets you decide the start and end date as per the product availability. You can decide the product expiry according to the kind of customer response you expect from the product.
This functionality is of great help especially when you want to sell seasonal goods or holiday specials on your Woo Store! Sounds pretty useful, doesn’t it?
Here is a list of the plugin features, in detail.
Principal Plugin Features
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Product Type Compatibility
WooCommerce Scheduler supports all WooCommerce Product Types, including Simple and Variable products. This is a huge advantage when you want to limit product availability for specific variations of a given product.
Not just that, you can also set separate product expiry dates for regular and sale periods. This gives you multiple options to knock around. You could set up each variation of a product for a limited time on sale or for a limited time but NOT on sale.
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Scheduling Product Availability
Product availability on your Woo Store can be added using Woo Scheduler with respect to both, date and time. That is, you can schedule a particular product to be available for a limited number of weeks, specific days in the week and for a limited time period during those days.
A subtle but powerful marketing strategy, this can provide a more directional approach for promoting your products and boosting sales.
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Bulk Scheduling
Scheduling each product individually can get tiresome very quickly. Fortunately, Woo Scheduler has an elegant solution for this, namely that of bulk scheduling of products. Depending on the product availability, you can set product expiry dates simultaneously for multiple products belonging to the same category.
This works for simple products from different categories too, but you cannot lump variable products from different categories together.
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Alternative Product Display
WooCommerce intuitively displays the ‘Out of Stock’ message when the product inventory is exhausted. Going one step further, Woo Scheduler lets you hide the product completely if product availability is null, irrespective of the product expiry date.
The plugin intuitively changes the visibility status to ‘Draft’ from ‘Published’ so the product becomes unavailable. This can be unchecked when the product is in stock again or you wish to display it as usual so that customers can still make an inquiry about its re-availability.
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User Interface
WooCommerce Scheduler has an intuitive interface that makes picking and choosing dates very simple. A miniature calendar for date picking ensures that you can keep track of the days until product expiry.
Even as a whole, the plugin is fairly easy to use since all you need is available directly on the Product page itself.
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Creation and Documentation
Woo Scheduler has decent documentation and a great fallback system. The user guide available gives a clear idea of how you are supposed to go about, from installation to scheduling and the plugin responds flexibly enough to make sure that product sales are not affected if the product expiry dates are not added correctly.
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How to Add Limited Edition Products in WooCommerce
Once you install and activate the WooCommerce Scheduler plugin in your store, setting up Limited Edition products becomes super easy.
Here’s what you need to do!
- Create a new product, the description, and attributes as usual. Add ‘Limited Edition’ in the product description or title.
- You should notice ‘Product Display’ settings on the product page
- Use the options available to schedule the product for a limited time
Woo Scheduler has a wide spectrum of applications, limited only by your imagination. The scheduling functionality can be extended to practically everything from simple, material goods like t-shirts and foodstuffs to virtual ones like hairdressing coupons and the like.
Do note that WooCommerce Scheduler can be used only for scheduling Products on your website. This is not an appointment or booking plugin, though you can set up special offers as products and sell them.
PRO TIPS:
- If you have an integrated email newsletter plugin installed on your website, you can even send out flyers informing your clients about the product availability for a scheduled period.
- Another option is to combine Woo Scheduler with QuoteUp, a quotation management plugin, so that you can not only offer limited edition products to your customers, you can also be open to negotiating for them!
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A Throwback
WooCommerce Scheduler caters to the singular functionality of scheduling product expiry as per the product availability on your WooCommerce store and it does this perfectly. A great way of increasing sales and improving customer experience, the plugin has you covered for every eventuality.
Developed by WisdmLabs, WooCommerce Scheduler is a paid plugin, with site-wise pricing plans. This includes upgrades and front-line support for the one-year duration.
WooCommerce Scheduler is a great tool for selling goods with a focused approach, scheduling products by targeting a specific customer base, according to market trends and of course, customer preference!
What other features do you think a scheduling plugin ought to have? Drop a comment to let us know!
