Role Based Pricing for WooCommerce vs Conditional Discounts for WooCommerce

The premise

As store owners, we know that one of the best ways to maintain our customer base is to set up special prices based on our users, individually or depending on their user roles. This has worked for centuries offline and is also a great way to maintain loyalty and keep them coming back, on our online stores. Whether its to offer loyalty-based discounts or rewards for referrals, it is only fair that you find a method that will make the implementation of your needs easy.

So many options

Thanks to the diversity of WordPress and WooCommerce, there are so many options to choose from. You could keep testing plugins, both free and paid that claim to help you do the job, but how do you settle on the one that will help you get to your goal quickly and easily? You will eventually need to analyze your choices for pros and cons. That is why this article came into existence.

Only the best is good enough for you

If you are looking for the best plugin to help you implement dynamic pricing structures based on user roles, then you need to consider two of the best: Role Based Pricing for WooCommerce by Addify and Conditional discounts for WooCommerce by Orion Origin.

 

Created by Addify and heralded by WooCommerce itself, Role Based Pricing for WooCommerce is a plugin that just does what its name says. It gives you the ability to alter pricing in your Woocommerce store, for individual products, categories, and specific products. First released on October 27, 2019, it has had two updates rolled out afterward, one of which was a UX/UI improvement, while the other was an added feature.

 

The Conditional Discounts for WooCommerce plugin, on the other hand, has been around since June 9, 2016, and has been updated several times afterward. Even though the Conditional Discounts for WooCommerce plugin has other features apart from the role-based discounts, its attributes for the user-based or role-based dynamic pricing are top-notch.

The difference

Here is a chart showing the different attributes of both plugins for review:

 

For Logged in Users	Role Based Pricing	Conditional Discounts
Adjust pricing for individual customers	Yes	Yes
Adjust pricing for user roles	Yes	Yes
Set a fixed product price	Yes	Yes
Increase price by fixed or percentage amount	Yes	Yes
Discount price by fixed or percentage amount	Yes	Yes
Change prices on the product level	Yes	Yes
Add rules to change prices in bulk for specific products or categories	Yes	Yes (using lists. Read about how they make product targeting so easy here)
Compatible with product variations	Yes	Yes
Set minimum and maximum order quantity	Yes	Yes
Replace original price	Yes	Yes
Strikethrough old price and show the new price as a special price	Yes	Yes
Configure start & end dates for each price rule	Yes	Yes
Hide price & Add-to-cart button for not logged in and specific user roles	Yes	No (Customization available on request)
Replace price with custom text	Yes	No (Customization available on request)
Replace the Add-to-Cart button with a new custom button & link	Yes	No (Customization available on request)
Newsletters: Integration with third-party newsletter plugins (more on this below)
Adjust price based on the user’s MailChimp subscription (integrated with the MailChimp plugin for WooCommerce)	No	Yes
Adjust price based on the user’s SendinBlue subscription (integrated with the SendinBlue Mailing list plugin for WooCommerce)	No	Yes
Adjust price based on the user’s Newsletter subscription (integrated with the Newsletterplugin for WooCommerce)	No	Yes
Memberships: Integration with third-party membership plugins (read more below)
Adjust price based on user’s groups (integrated with the WordPress Groups plugin)	No	Yes
Adjust price based on the user’s affiliate network (integrated with the AffiliateWP plugin for WooCommerce)	No	Yes
Adjust price based on customer’s email domain	No	Yes
User Actions: price adjustments based on the customer’s actions (more on that below)
Adjust price based on the user’s selected shipping or billing state or country	No	Yes
Adjust price based on the customer’s previous activities: previously ordered specific products, the total count of previously ordered products, the total amount spent previously in the store)	No	Yes
Price change based on customer’s previous reviews in the store.	No	Yes
Price change based on the currently selected products by the user, in the cart.	No	Yes

Perhaps it will be beneficial to explain the attributes that are absent in the Role Based Pricing for WooCommerce plugin. Based on customer feedback over the years, the authors of the plugin have added additional features, grouped into:

1. Newsletter Subscriptions

   The store owner can set custom pricing structures based on the subscriptions of the user to any of these three third-party plugins: MailChimp for WooCommerce, SendinBlue for WooCommerce, and Newsletterplugin for WooCommerce.

2. Memberships

   Custom pricing structures can be put in place for members of affiliate networks (if using the AffiliateWP for WooCommerce plugin) or groups (if using the Groups plugin for WordPress) or even domains – you can set up a custom price rule for clients that have email addresses that belong under a certain domain.

3. User Actions

   Prices can adjust dynamically based on several factors that are initiated by the customer’s actions. These include:

   1. The selected shipping or billing state or country;
   2. User’s previous activities: previously ordered specific products, the total count of previously ordered products, the total amount spent previously in the store);
   3. Customer’s previous reviews in the store;
   4. Customer’s currently chosen products in the cart.

Conclusion

The Role Based Pricing for WooCommerce plugin meets the basic needs of user role and individual-based dynamic pricing updates, based on set rules. The Conditional Discounts for WooCommerce plugin does a lot more and is integrated with several more third-party WordPress plugins. It is safe to say that in the quest for a role based pricing plugin for WooCommerce, with a lot of features, choosing the Conditional Discounts for WooCommerce plugin will be a very wise decision.