WooCommerce – a top-tier eCommerce platform – promotes itself as: “Selling anything, anywhere. Beautifully.”
It also allows you to sell anytime you choose!
With WooCommerce, you can set up online stores for various types of businesses, be it retail or a marketplace, dealing with shippable items or downloadable products. WooCommerce and its full range of extensions cater to all your needs.
This includes creating a store where you need to sell products on a specific schedule!
Why Schedule Certain Products?
Every business has its unique demands.
For example, in an online food ordering business, because the products being offered are perishable, these items are only available for purchase during specific times.
Other scenarios where scheduling is essential include:
- Home-based businesses facing stock management challenges: Small businesses often need to boost production to meet demand, sometimes leading to stock shortages until the next production cycle. Thus, product availability needs to be scheduled.
- Companies experimenting with new products: Businesses testing new products might want to restrict their availability to gauge market interest.
- Businesses selling limited-edition items: These unique products have a limited number available and may only be sold for a short period.
- Seasonal demands: Certain products are in demand during specific seasons, like heart-shaped badges for Valentine’s Day, jack-o-lanterns for Halloween, or umbrellas during rainy seasons. These products require scheduling based on their seasonal popularity.
- As a marketing strategy: Creating a sense of urgency by selling products for a limited time with a countdown timer can spur buyers to make quicker decisions.
If you need to sell products on a schedule, you have two options – manual or automated.
Manually means adding and removing products for sale at specific times. Alternatively, you can use the automated approach by creating a product availability schedule.
How to Set Up a Product Availability Schedule?
Creating a product availability schedule involves setting start and end dates for purchases.
For example, let’s say you’re selling heart-shaped badges for Valentine’s Day from February 1 to February 15, 2018.
To achieve this, you’d need the WooCommerce Scheduler extension, which allows you to set Start and End Dates for purchase availability and create a schedule.
Scheduler, the comprehensive product scheduling plugin for WooCommerce, enables you to:
- Schedule product availability by date and time
- Plan daily product schedules
- Set weekly schedules for products
- Show custom messages when products are unavailable
- Include countdown timers indicating product availability
- Schedule simple and variable WooCommerce products
Once you install and activate the extension, you can access settings to schedule product purchases.
On setting the desired parameters, the product will either be available during the specified period on your WooCommerce store or display a custom unavailability message.
If your business offers daily specials like a restaurant, you can configure products to be available on specific days using the ‘Per Day‘ and ‘Days of Week‘ settings.
Moreover, you can schedule multiple products together using the Product Timetable Manager feature under ‘General‘ settings.
Customers will be alerted to product availability with a visible countdown timer provided by Scheduler.
Conclusion
Planning product availability with WooCommerce Scheduler is as simple as configuring any other product setting.
With its user-friendly settings panel, Scheduler simplifies the process of setting availability dates and times for multiple products at once. The countdown timer not only showcases product availability but also indicates when the product will be next available.
Priced reasonably at $24 for a single site license and $99 for a lifetime license, this plugin offers a hassle-free way to create schedules and forget about them.
If you have any queries, feel free to discuss them in the comments section.