I’m still trying to find the best way to handle bulk discounts for font sales in WooCommerce. I’m taking about the (quantity price = (base price * multiple) style pricing that most type vendors use. I may hire a developer to add support to an existing, and probably open-source, plugin. If I do is anybody else interested?
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Exactly how to do this is up for discussion. Desktop licenses can easily be handled with a standard quantity field. App and ebook licenses might require a dropdown with quantities or options, but I would still prefer to do that without variations.
For my own purposes I am currently developing a custom WooCommerce product type plugin for exactly this type of application, i.e. typefaces with licence and corresponding pricing options, which I internally want to treat as "just one product" in the catalog.
So far I've created a Custom WooCommerce "typeface" product type as plugin. With it you can define and feed licence types (you can define them yourself, so say "desktop", "web", etc.) and options (like 1-5 users, 100% price, 6-10 users, 150% price, etc.), and associate those licence types with any uploaded downloadables from the product, which then become available selectively to based on what licences the customer based purchased. The prices can be set percentually or absolute, and each product can use defaults or overwrite them. Since it modifies a lot of price related things via hooks "along the way" I am not sure how generally applicable it is to other scenarios, but with some work it could be made to work more universally. Still somewhat work in progress at the moment, though.
@Johannes Neumeier, do you have plans to finish this plugin still? Will you be sharing/selling it? I don't know how many Woo Font sites there are, but this plugin would be extremely for some of us!
It's indeed rather a specific niche, so I doubt that making it publicly available "as is" would result in happy admin users, or useful code contributions for that matter (happy to be surprised, if someone is interested in pitching in). One option would be to do an assessment on what's needed to make it a little more generally applicable or integrate with your specific site and needs. This would have to be further down the line, though, after those two projects I mentioned are launched. I'll post back here once I got something more substantial to share with any interested designers. Feel free to share how your sites and plans are developing in this regard
The plugin allows you to use a "Typeface product" for which the pricing and files can be modular - it's like a default downloadable product with the added benefit of license options. You define license types, their available purchase options and pricing modifiers, as well as the files that should get bundled with what specific license purchase.
Here a few screenshots to illustrate the backend:
Setting up the licenses, ideally done once only, but changing the site-wide percentage modifiers or combo discounting options is possible on the fly:
Creating a WooCommerce product and adding the different files for different license purchases and previews in the front end:
Setting the product license prices (either inherit site wide defaults, or overwrite as highlighted) and selecting what files get shipped with what license:
So once you have this setup the pricing for all fonts on the entire site can be changed, different license options tweaked, and you will have one product per style or family you sell, no matter how many license combinations - which is my absolute main goal for the plugin. For purchases the plugin will automatically generate one zip file for each product based on the selected license's associated files, and that file is generated on the fly when the user requests it.
On the downside, here is what this plugin is still missing to be "generally applicable":
As mentioned to Stuart I am obviously invested in this myself as any improvement or feature added for a public release will also make my own life easier, but realistically speaking, to make this public I am looking at days and weeks of development time that I am not billing anybody or producing retail typefaces.
What I imagine could work is a bunch of people interested in this commit more or less to a donation of their own choice down the road, and are involved in development by steering what they need, testing the plugin, providing feedback, and if desired, can hire me to implement or integrate the plugin further for their respective sites. From there the plugin can go either donation-ware open source for anybody, or available as closed source perpetual use licenses to those who chip in.
I know from my Fontsampler Wordpress plugin that there is a small niche market for type foundries and designers running a shop on Wordpress, but to be honest I am still trying to feel the room temperature with this. Is there demand and are people willing to seriously chip in? Two or three people willing to send me a hundred bucks doesn't make this viable for me, unfortunately, nor is it an honest return on my already invested time.
Public discussion is welcome, as is private, and thanks to Stuart for reminding me about this
I definitely think there is some demand for this— there doesn’t seem to be any decent alternatives to this out there. I guess everyone else just uses generic strorefronts/carts and hack them to fit their font licensing model.
However, this needs them to be invested into the whole Wordpress / WooCommerce setup. Maybe a more generic solution? Just a JS plugin?