Updated: Jan 03, 2023 By: Dessign Team
Negotiations while shopping online? Ever thought about that? Here is an interesting solution to implement it in your store, where customers can raise a quote for their choice of products and services when they buy them online. Satisfying customers is not an easy task. Pricing is always a factor that influences the response of a customer towards the store. Sometimes with unaffordable prices, it becomes difficult to purchase that favorite thing or in the desired quantity. Hence this might lead to customers abandoning their purchase plans.
In a physical store or in conversation with a sales representative, it is relatively easy to negotiate prices. However, this is not quite possible in an online store. For some businesses, this may lead to loss of sales and hence they might hesitate to create an online channel.
What is a good solution for this? Providing an option for customers to request a quote for the products they are interested in could be a good way to go about it. What is WooCommerce and how it can help build online store.
Moreover, this also helps to personalize the requests and then help the customer to fulfill their specific wishes. It will also drastically reduce the cart abandonment rate.
In this article, we take a look at one of the powerful plugins that let your customers get a better chance to obtain better prices. To facilitate the same, you can place a Request a Quote option on their product page or Shop page.
“Request a Quote” option for your WooCommerce store
In some cases, you might want to provide a tailor-made option for your customers. For example, your customer wants to order a specific set of posters that are designed for their unique brand. In such cases, you might not just want to place the option to buy from the store, but let your customers specify their requirements and their budget with respect to the quantity of the product they are purchasing.
Hence with this “Request a Quote” option on your WooCommerce store, you can trigger pre-sales conversation in a healthy way to help your customer state their price for the required quantity or even ask for custom pricing. This will improve the customer experience and enhance your brand.
Here we make use of the ELEX WooCommerce Request a Quote Plugin to help you in creating a Request a Quote option on your WooCommerce store.
It is quite easy to create a “Request a Quote” option on your store – all you need to do is set the plugin correctly to ease the process. First, you can decide where the Request a Quote option should be placed on your store. For this, you need to decide whether you want all your products to have the option, or only a few. Once you decide on the products for which you want the Request a Quote option to be displayed, you can set the same in the plugin.
You can easily set this as per your preferences on your store using the plugin. And also you can even exclude and include the products with respect to category, name, tags etc on your store.
The above settings will help to exclude and include the products that need to display the “Request a Quote” option in the WooCommerce store.
If you want to customize the button with respect to your design, then you can also make use of the General Settings of the plugin to complement the aesthetic needs of your store.
Whenever a customer is browsing your online store, they might want to create a quote list, which will consist of items they want to make a purchase in bulk or to simply consider for purchase. In such cases, it would be better to provide an option to add different choices to the list, as we do in a physical retail store. This also gives them an opportunity to check back and sort again depending on the need. To facilitate the same, you can provide two options – one is to redirect the customer to a Quote page, or if you don’t want to drive to another page, you can do so by opting for a Lightbox, wherein a popup window appears with the list of items in the quote list. You can set the same in the plugin settings in the button action for “Add to Quote”.
Here we have two options, one is to open the Request a Quote Page or open in a Lightbox. Both are advantageous in one or the other way. Whenever the customer clicks on the Add to Quote button, a hypertext with “Browse list” will open up.
If you want to redirect to the Quote list page, you can select the first option “Open Request a Quote Page”. The Quotes list page that opens up will look like the below screenshot.
Here the customer can easily see the list of products with the quotes and also fill in a desired message to the store admin to communicate their views and negotiations and then place the quote request.
If you choose the Lightbox option, then a pop-up window will appear like the below screenshot :
You can also set the length and width of the Lightbox in the plugin settings to make it aligned to your site design. Here the customer can go to the My Accounts page and also browse for the products.
Again if you have unregistered customers visiting, you can also prompt the customer to get registered before the Quote request is placed on your store.
Yet another factor is the form that fetches the quote request from the customer. A form must be designed in such a way that the customer can easily fill in the details that are relevant for the store admin to process the request. The key to creating the ideal forms lies in the analysis of what your customer wants. Create better forms with the plugin to ensure you give the customer the opportunity to provide details and their requirements clearly.
Ensure to include important fields like name, email, phone number etc.
The next important thing to do is set notifications. To ensure that you get notified whenever a customer places a request on your website, you need to set the preferences clearly.
The plugin lets you get notified for many things from submitting a quote request to even rejecting or accepting the same.
Notifications keep you always alert and never let any business opportunity go away from you. It helps to keep in touch with the customers and also provide timely data or information they are looking for. It is ideal to keep the customers engaged. It also upkeeps their interests and allows a drastic increase in the interaction rate. Here in the plugin, you can set push notifications for various order status from your WooCommerce store.
The plugin lets you set a notification to arrive via SMS, Google Chat notifications apart from the email notification to the store admin. To enable the Google Chat notifications, you can set the Webhooks for the same for your store admin. And for SMS notifications, you can sign up with Twilio which will help you set the same.
Through this option, you can easily get updates on quote requests through email, SMS or even Google Chat. And also with the email notification option, you can send updates to the customers easily when you receive, approve or reject a quote.
Isn’t that easy to let your customers request a quote on your WooCommerce store now?
To Wrap Up,
Setting up clear preferences for your user interaction on the store will strengthen the trust of your customers. Letting customers negotiate electronically through this efficient system will automatically help build your brand. Opening up room for negotiation, especially when it comes to bulk buyers will augment sales and conversions.