In the last post, we had seen how to sell vacation rentals with WooCommerce. Rentals are sold by fixed booking periods as well as varying booking periods. In that post, we saw how to sell rentals with WooCommerce which have fixed booking periods.
In this post, we shall check how to sell volume discount rentals of varying booking periods with the WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin.
If you are a regular visitor on rental websites, you must have noticed that they give huge discounts for staying in a rental apartment for long periods of time. That’s exactly what we will be seeing in this post. Volume discount does not refer to “Quantity” or number of people. Usually, people associate volume with quantity. Here volume refers to the number of days being booked. We will be specifically dealing with cases where the site owners may want to reduce the per-night prices when the number of days booked is higher.
Volume discount Rentals with WooCommerce: Admin Experience
Your first step will be creating rentals as a new product in WooCommerce. You can do that from the Products -> Add Product link. On the same page, you would also find the Booking meta box that allows you to set up your rental house.
Next up, you have to do some general booking settings. Under the “Booking Options” tab, I have selected the Enable Booking Date and Allow multiple days booking options for the user to be able to select a start date and an end date.
Typically when an apartment is reserved by a customer, it is not available for further booking until that customer checks out. Hence the Lockout date after X orders option is set to 1. Once the apartment is booked, those dates will be unavailable for further bookings.
A reservation system must allow you to specify how much time in advance you want the booking to be done. You might not want the customers to book for the vacation home just 30 minutes before the check-in time.
The WooCommerce Booking & Appointment plugin allows you to do that by specifying the number of hours in the Advance Booking Period field. It is present in the Bookable Time Period tab. I have set it to 24 hours. It means that an online booking can be done only 24 hours prior to the start date (check-in). So if you are trying to book today for today’s check-in, you won’t be able to do that. You will have the earliest check-in of 24 hours from today, which would be tomorrow.
You can keep it to any number of hours according to your needs. Normally the apartment is cleaned and made ready once the previous customer has checked out for a fresh booking. The time taken to do that can be the number of hours before you want to enable booking for the same apartment.
The Number of Dates to choose lets you determine the maximum number of days from today which you want to allow booking for. In some cases, this could be a month (30 days) or even a year (365 days). I have set it to 365 days, which means the calendar will have dated for a year from today to choose from.
For setting up volume discount rentals, you have to check the “Enable Price by range of days” option under the Price by range of days tab. This tab allows you to create multiple bookable blocks of varying numbers of days. You can set the price for rentals per night or even set a fixed price for that range of days. You can create multiple ranges like 7 days to 14 days, 15 days to 30 days & so on.
To add a new range, you should click on the “Add New Range” button. You will be able to create one block at a time & save it. Saving it shall show that block details right below it in the “Booking Days Range” table.
You have to ensure that the starting and ending days of your range don’t overlap.
I have created three ranges. We shall see how it will work for a couple of cases.
Case 1: 20 days booking – If the customer rents an apartment for 20 days, they will be charged £2400 (£120 x 20 days).
Case 2: 8 days booking – If the customer rents an apartment for 8 days, they will be charged £1120 (£140 x 8 days).
Case 3: 3 days booking – If the customer rents the apartment for less than 7 days, say 3 days, they will be charged £480 because I have set the regular price as £160 per night as you can see in the screenshot below.
When the number of days being booked doesn’t fall in any range, it will take the “Regular Price” or “Sales Price” as the per night price for the remaining days.
Case 4: 100 days booking – If you rent it for more than 90 days, say 100 days, then the cost will sum up to £10,510 ( ( £99 x 90 days ) + ( £160 x 10 days) ). It will calculate the maximum available range and the rest of the days will be charged at £160 per night.
Since this is a “Simple Product”, there aren’t any specific settings under the product data section. You just have to enter the basic details like the Regular price and Sale price. For this product, you actually don’t need to even set the prices since you already did that while creating range blocks. But in order to handle the case when the number of days being booked does not fall in any of the ranges, I have set the price as £160.00
Volume discount Rentals with WooCommerce: Customer Experience
Once these settings are done, your front end would appear as shown below. I have given a brief description of all the booking ranges and their prices so that the customer is well-informed.
Once you select the start and end dates, the “Add to Cart” button is visible. When you click on that button, the order is added to your cart and there is a button to “View your Cart”. On clicking that, you are redirected to the cart page which will show the booking details.
When on the cart page, unless you don’t want to update your cart, you can go to the checkout page by clicking on “Proceed to checkout” button.
The checkout page will show the booking dates you have chosen and the total amount for your order. You can place your order if everything seems fine. The checkout page gives you a preview of the actual order. Please ensure you check everything and then click on the “Place Order” button.
After placing your order, the order details are shown on the Thank You page. Email notifications are sent to the customer and the administrator with the rental booking details.
Conclusion
Whether you are renting a car for an exciting road trip, an apartment, beach house, villa for a week, or cottage for weekends, WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin lets you rent them easily using the “Price by range of days” feature. It is the simplest way to rent anything with WordPress & WooCommerce.
It is also possible to use this setup with WooCommerce Variations. The above example was for Simple Products only.
It will take approximately 20 minutes to set up if you are using it for the first time.
If you haven’t bought the plugin yet, you can purchase it from here.
