Today’s Ask Jilt question comes from Travis:

Is there a way to create a “Buy X, Get Y” system with WooCommerce? Ideally Product Y would be given to the customer for free automatically (no coupon code needed).

This was one I wasn’t sure about at first smile However, after a bit of digging through the extension marketplace, it looks like the Chained Products extension ($49+) is exactly the right tool to help you gift WooCommerce products to your customers.

This lets you create a system where a customer gets a free product with purchase; this can be a product that’s typically paid for, or a hidden free product you have just for this occasion.

Once you’ve activated and installed the plugin, setting up chained products for WooCommerce is very simple. While editing the product, go to Product Data > Linked Products. This will give you new options to add chained products. You can add 1 or more products with this “main” product.

Now this chained product will be given away for free when your main product is purchased. You can even manage the inventory of this chained product to be sure you don’t run out of free gifts.

The customer will see this chained product in the cart, but cannot adjust its quantity or remove it.

When a main product is removed, the chained product is removed from the cart as well. If the quantity of the main product is adjusted, the chained product will be adjusted too.

That’s about it! You can definitely do some more with Chained Products though if you want to expand your usage of free gift WooCommerce products.

You can give away more than one chained product with a main product purchase. Click the + button next to the first chained product to add more chained products to the bundle.

When the product is purchased, all of your selected chained products will be added to the cart. You can adjust the quantities of each as well.

You probably want your customers to know about your free gifts, right? There’s a handy [chained_products] shortcode you can use on your product page to output which products are included in purchase (either in your description or short description).

This purchase includes:

[chained_products]

When this is used, the chained products are output automatically:

This shortcode also accepts attributes to modify its display, letting you change things like whether the price should be shown or not.

As a quick alternative, I didn’t want to show this with just one free gift, so I added a WooCommerce notice to my short description instead (you’d need to replace my product name / link with your own):

<div class="woocommerce-info">Special deal! Get <a href="/product/woo-single-1/">Woo Single #1</a> for <strong>free</strong> when you purchase this album!</div>

This showed a notice instead:

If you use variable products, you can chain a gift to a specific product variation. When you edit your WooCommerce variations, you’ll manage chained products on a per-variation basis. You can also use the variation description to output chained products.

If a variation does not have a chained product, it will be displayed normally.

If the variation does have a chained product, this will be available when the variation is purchased.

A chained product for a variation will act the same way in the cart as a simple product’s chained product.

WooCommerce Chained Products provides the perfect solution for automatically gifting WooCommerce products for free to your customers. This is a great way to give out samples, reward customers for purchasing new products, give away Memberships products with a purchase, or put together simple bundles.

The ability to manage inventory while giving away chained products makes it very simple to both sell or give away a free product with purchase without losing track of your stock on hand.

Hope this helps Travis!