Running a sale in WooCommerce sounds like a routine store management task, and for a small store with a handful of products, it can be.
But as your catalog grows and your promotions become more refined and targeted, you will likely find that WooCommerce’s native sale tools don't scale with your needs as cleanly as you'd hope.
Here is a full breakdown of how to run a sale in WooCommerce, from the simplest approach to the most flexible one.
Setting a Sale Price Directly on a Product
The most direct way to mark a product as on sale in WooCommerce is to edit the product and set a sale price in the Product Data panel.
Enter the original price in the Regular Price field and then the discounted price in the Sale Price field. On the frontend of your store, WooCommerce will display the original price with a strikethrough and the sale price beside it.
You can also use the Schedule option to set the sale's start and end dates. This makes this method suitable if you want to run your promotions for a time-limited period.
The limitation of this method, however, is one you will feel as soon as you try to scale it. Editing each product individually is manageable if you only have five products in your catalog. For fifty, it becomes a slow, error-prone process; for a hundred or more, it becomes a major workflow problem.
Running a Sale With Coupons
WooCommerce coupons let you run a sale without changing product prices at all. You simply create a percentage or fixed-amount coupon and then share the code with your audience. Customers who use the code at checkout instantly receive the discount.
This is useful for flash sales, email subscriber promotions, or any scenario where you want control over who receives the sale price. The downside of this method is the coupon field dependency, where customers need to have the code and need to remember to enter it.
Running a Sale With a Discount Rules Plugin
If you want to run WooCommerce sales that need to span specific product categories, apply automatically, or adjust based on the number of items a customer purchases, a dedicated discount rules plugin is the most efficient tool.
Elevated Discount Rules lets you run a sale on WooCommerce as a rule rather than a manual task.
You create a discount, say, 25% off everything in the "Dresses" category, and it applies automatically for every customer who shops in that category from the moment the rule is active.
Simple discounts can be set to apply across your entire product catalog, or scoped to specific products or categories.
Bulk pricing lets you structure the sale as a tiered incentive, where the discount deepens at higher quantities.
Fixed-price bundle rules let you run promotions like "any two products for $50."
The display and messaging settings let you add a promotional banner on qualifying product pages so customers know that the sale is happening before they reach checkout.
You can also assign priority to rules, which is useful when you are running multiple sales simultaneously and need to control which discount applies first.
Final Thoughts
Running a sale in WooCommerce can involve anything from a simple product price edit to a fully automated, rule-driven promotion. The right method for you depends on the size of your catalog and the complexity of the sale you want to run.
For straightforward, one-off product sales, WooCommerce's native tools are sufficient. But for anything broader, more automated, or more targeted, Elevated Discount Rules gives you the architecture to run sales that actually behave in the way that you intend.
If you would like to explore more plugin options for running sales in WooCommerce, our guide to the 6 Best WooCommerce Discount Plugins is a good next stop.
