WC Price History Plugin – Smarter Pricing Insights for WooCommerce Stores
In the case of a e-commerce business, you are relying on a price to determine your purchases. Customers desire to understand that they are receiving a good price. However, WooCommerce does not archive past prices and display them automatically. WC Price History bridges that gap as it captures prices and displays the lowest price in a given time (usually 30 days). That is not a nice-to-have, in certain areas that is a compliance requirement of displaying sale pricing in a fair and transparent manner.
This is one of the plugs that are particularly applicable when creating client stores, streamlining ecommerce experiences or handling pricing strategy. It is simple to install, works with WooCommerce environments, and allows you to decide on the way price history will be displayed in the store.
Features
WC Price History specializes in the practice, store-front and administration functionalities. The following are its essential characteristics and their implications to your store.
Price Tracking and History
The fundamental intention of this plugin is to record price changes with time. Whenever a product is changed in price, the same is recorded by the plugin and is used to compute the lowest price within the specified time frame (such as the past 30 days). This lowest price is displayed on product pages and listings making it more transparent.
This historical tracking will provide the shoppers with some background, not merely the sale price at a point in time, but a clue of the good deal that it actually is. This will enhance the conversion rates among digital marketers and ecommerce managers since guesses will be eliminated among buyers.
Adjustable Display Preferences
The plug in does not impose a universal display. Location of price history in your store can be selected. Options include:
- Single product pages
- Shop listing pages
- tag archive pages and category pages
- Upsell and related products modules
You choose where it would be appropriate to display that lowest price information, depending upon your theme and UX priorities.
Display behavior is also programmable. To have an example, you can only display the lowest price when the product is on sale, or display it all the time. You may also specify the calculation of the period either as of the date of sale or of the date of establishment.
Variable Product Support
WC price history will take care of them independently should your store stock items with options (such as size or color) which are known as variable products. The price history of each variation is recorded independently and the plugin is used to dynamically update the lowest price shown on the site when a particular variation is chosen by a customer and no page reload is required.
This aspect is important to outlets having complicated product arrangements. It makes the shopper see the truth and does not display the price history that is irrelevant.
Pro-Ready: Admin Visibility and Edit Controls
Although the free version only shows the display and simple tracking, the new Pro version (under development) will allow viewing and editing price history within the WordPress admin. It implies that you will be able to fix mistakes, analyze prices directly on your dashboard, and control history when necessary in a more accurate way.
This operational visibility comes in handy where one has a huge catalog or in case there are third-party price tools at work.
Custom Placement Shortcodes
WC Price History has a simple shortcode ([wc_pricehistory_]) which supports more control. That allows you to place the lowest price on any part of your site, whether in a custom template, landing page or even a promotional block, and it can be optional with parameters to fine-tune how it looks.
Compliant with Pricing Laws
The installation of this plugin by shops is to meet European pricing regulations such as the Omnibus directive (European Commission Directive 98/6/EC Article 6a) one of which is the display of the lowest selling price over a past period. WC Price History makes it easy to fulfill such a requirement.
Pricing
WC Price History has a Free version and Pro version.
Free Version
The free edition is offered at the WordPress repository and comes with all the basic features needed to provide a promotion price by the EU standards. This includes automatic price monitoring and showing the lowest price per the time period set. Most of the small and mid-sized stores using WooCommerce do not need to spend much money to cover the free version.
Pro Version
The Pro version is priced at:
- EUR49 per year for 1 site license
The license includes:
- 1 year of updates
- 1 year of support
- 14-day money-back guarantee
The Pro version is much more functional. It allows you to:
- Browse full price history
- Make changes and undo price records.
- Access detailed price logs
- Manual override fixed lowest price
- Add “From” prefix support
- High-tech compliance and pricing control.
- Look ahead at functionality such as price charts.
Pro version provides more control over historical data and pricing changes directly within WordPress to the agency, the ecommerce managers, and the developers working with multiple pricing campaigns.
Pros and Cons
The following is a list of the strengths and weaknesses of WC Price History:
Pros
- Open source – complete core functionality, no subscriptions.
- Simple to set up and install – fits with WooCommerce settings.
- Customizable display – determine the location and time of price history.
- Variable product support- precise price per variation.
- Assistive in compliance – aids legal necessities in legal areas with pricing regulations.
- Flexibility in the form of shortcodes anything.
- Active install base and high rating 5 star user feedback and 25,000+ downloads are indicators of trust.
Cons
- Pro is yet to be released – more powerful administration capabilities are promised, but not in reality.
- No in-built charting or visual graphs – in case you want price-history charts, you would require another separate plug-in. (Existing alternatives of Product Price History.)
- Poor marketing capabilities – this tool is designed to show price and not analytics and customer triggers.
Summary
WC Price History is a specialized, useful extension of WooCommerce, which addresses a significant loophole: the tracking and the display of historic prices. It is a transparency to ecommerce managers, web developers, digital marketers, and site owners, which brings transparency and credibility to your store front, particularly to the stores that deal with markets with stringent pricing regulations.
It is open source, simple to set up and it can be easily integrated with WooCommerce. Its feature set is more visibility-oriented than analytics, but it does not need a lot of extravagant complexity to complete the basic job. When the Pro version is released, it should have more administrative features and data management.
The fact that this price history functionality is available at low cost and does not require much setup overhead has made this a worth considering plugin.
About the Author
Anna Malik – digital nomad, enthusiast of everything online and in the cloud, productivity maniac. She travels around the world reviewing web applications and other resources for Web People for our blog.
