WooCommerce gives store owners more than one way to add discounts to products, which is a good thing. 

However, the less good news is that the native tools it provides are fairly limited in scope. They only cover the basics and leave many common discounting scenarios either impossible or unnecessarily complicated to set up.

If you are looking for a quick, direct answer, you can set up a simple WooCommerce discount through the Coupons system under WooCommerce → Coupons in your WordPress dashboard. 

But if you need more advanced discount logic, such as automatic discounts, tiered pricing, and category-level rules, you will need a dedicated discount rules plugin.

Here's how both paths work.

Adding a Discount Using WooCommerce's Native Coupon System

WooCommerce's built-in coupon system lets you create discount codes that customers can apply at checkout. To add one, go to WooCommerce → Coupons → Add New Coupon.

From there, you can configure your preferred discount type, such as percentage off, fixed cart amount, or fixed product discount. You can also set conditions like a minimum order value, product or category restrictions, and usage limits.

The process is fairly intuitive for simple use cases. If you want to run a 20%-off sitewide promotion using a code, WooCommerce handles it without any extra plugins.

The native system, however, starts to show its limitations when you need your discounts to work automatically, apply across product tiers, or respond to cart behavior. 

WooCommerce coupons do not have a system for auto-applying a discount rule silently in the background without the customer’s input. It always requires that the customer actively enter a code. For stores that care about providing customers with a seamless, frictionless buying experience, this is a genuine constraint.

Even though you can also set a sale price for any individual product from the product edit screen, the feature is a rather static, manual change on a per-product basis, not a discount rule.

Adding a Discount With a Plugin

A dedicated discount rules plugin lifts the ceiling on what WooCommerce can do natively. Instead of managing individual coupon codes, you can add rule-based discounts that trigger automatically when their conditions are met.

Elevated Discount Rules is the most flexible discount rules plugin for WooCommerce stores. 

It lets you add multiple discount types, including simple percentage or fixed discounts, tiered bulk pricing, and fixed-price product bundles. 

You can scope your discount rules to specific products, product categories, or your entire catalog. You can also target all customers or specific user roles.

Once a rule is active and its conditions are met, it applies automatically without requiring a coupon code. When a customer adds a qualifying product to their cart, the discount fires silently and immediately, with no friction in the checkout experience. 

You can also control priority across multiple active discount rules, so there is never any ambiguity about which discount takes precedence when more than one rule applies.

Final Thoughts

To add discounts in WooCommerce for basic, code-based promotions, its native coupon system is a reasonable starting point. 

But if you want to add discounts that apply automatically, respond to purchase quantity, target specific customer segments, or fire based on category-level rules, the native Coupons tool is not built for that.

Elevated Discount Rules fills that gap directly, letting you add discounts in WooCommerce that go well beyond what a coupon code can do.

For other WooCommerce discount rule plugins, see 6 Best WooCommerce Discount Plugins.