The Deals page is a clearance page from your products currently on sale: you publish it once, and it keeps itself up to date as prices change. The free gift, an Experimental feature, lets a shopper claim one product for free once their cart reaches a minimum. It’s a way to give away stock that isn’t selling.
You will learn #
- How to publish the Deals page and choose what it shows
- Which products appear on the page, and why some don’t
- How to switch the free gift on and pick what to give away
- How to see what the gift did for your orders
Before you begin #
- Put some products on sale. The Deals page shows products with a sale price running now: discounts from Auto outlet or Manual outlet, and sale prices you set in WooCommerce.
- For the free gift, turn on Experimental features. In Settings, under Experimental & license, turn on Enable experimental features and save. The Experimental page then appears in the Tendlio menu. Only simple products (products without variations, like sizes) can be gifts.
Part 1: The Deals page #
Publish the page #
- In your WordPress admin, open Tendlio → Storefront, and click the Deals tab.
- Check that Enable the deals page is on. It’s on from the start.
- Next to the shortcode
[tendlio_deals], click Copy. - Create a new page in WordPress, for example “Deals”, paste the shortcode into it (in the block editor, into a Shortcode block), and publish the page.
- Add the page to your menu, so shoppers can find it.
Put the shortcode on a page rather than in a template or a widget area. Tendlio looks for it in your published pages and posts, and counts the page’s clicks only when it’s there. Until Tendlio finds it on a published page, the Deals card on the Sales lift page reads On, not placed yet, and the one on the Growth engine page reads Off and asks you to publish a sale page.
Choose what the page shows #
- Minimum discount: the smallest discount a product needs to appear. It starts at 20%. A product that Auto outlet or Manual outlet is discounting appears whatever the size of its discount. A sale price you set yourself in WooCommerce has to reach the minimum.
- Sort by: Biggest discount first (where it starts), Newest first, Best selling first, Cheapest first or Most expensive first.
- Layout: Columns is how many columns the grid has, and Products per batch is how many products load at a time. They start at 4 and 24. When a shopper scrolls near the end of the page, the next batch loads on its own, and shoppers can also click the button below the grid to load it.
- Load more button text: the text on that button. Leave it blank for “Load more”.
- Exclude categories: products in the categories you tick never appear on the page. Ticking a category includes its subcategories.
- Cache (Advanced mode): how long Tendlio keeps its list of products on sale before building it again. It starts at 60 minutes, and a price change clears it right away, so the setting only matters as a safety net.
Click Save settings after you change something.
You can give one page its own settings in the shortcode: min for the minimum discount, columns, per_batch, and sort (discount_desc, date_desc, sales_desc, price_asc or price_desc), for example [tendlio_deals min="30" columns="3" per_batch="12" sort="price_asc"].
To take the page down for a while, turn off Enable the deals page. The shortcode then shows nothing, so you can leave it on the page.
Which products appear #
The page lists products that are on sale right now and in stock. Products on backorder don’t appear. A sale you’ve scheduled for later, or one whose dates have passed, doesn’t count. A product with options, like sizes or colors, appears when its lowest price is discounted. Three kinds of products stay off the page even when they’re on sale:
- products you’ve hidden from your shop’s catalog in WooCommerce
- products you’ve hidden from recommendations in Tendlio
- products in the categories you’ve excluded
The page shows up to 1,000 products. If more are on sale, it keeps the ones that sold the most units, and the Deals tab says so: “You have more products on sale than the page shows.” When no product qualifies, shoppers see “No products are on sale right now.”
Part 2: The free gift #
Switch the gift on #
- With Experimental features on, open Tendlio → Experimental, and find Free gift with an order.
- Under Offer a free gift, turn on Show the “claim your free gift” slider on the cart.
- Under Minimum cart total, set the amount a cart has to reach before the gift is offered. Until you set it, the minimum is 0 and nothing is offered. Set it a little above your typical order, about one more item’s worth, so shoppers add something to reach it instead of getting the gift for what they already spend.
- Under Heading, type the title above the gifts. It starts as “Claim your free gift”.
- Click Save.
Tendlio compares the minimum with the products in the cart after any coupon, not counting shipping or tax.
Pick what to give away #
- Under Pick what to give away, type at least two letters of a product’s name in the search box, and tick the product in the results.
- Or tick Offer next to a product under Suggested: dead and slow-moving stock. That list comes from the products Manual outlet shows under Clear / dead and Revive / slow: dead stock first, then slow-moving products. When there are more than it shows, a line above the table says so.
Each tick is saved right away. You can also tick Offer as a free gift on the product’s General tab in WooCommerce.
Good candidates are stock you’d otherwise write off that still looks like a prize to the shopper.
What shoppers see #
- On the classic cart page, once the cart reaches your minimum, a row appears under the list of items in the cart, with your heading and up to 12 gifts. Each gift is marked FREE and has a Claim this button. Only gifts that are in stock appear.
- Claiming a gift adds it to the cart at no cost. It’s one unit, and the shopper can’t change the quantity. Once a gift is in the cart, the row goes away, so there’s one gift per order. To switch, the shopper removes the gift from the cart, and the row comes back.
- If the cart drops below the minimum, for example after the shopper removes a product or adds a coupon, Tendlio takes the gift out and tells the shopper why. It does the same when the gift sells out in the meantime, or when another plugin would charge for it. In each case the rest of the order goes through.
If your cart page uses the block Cart, the gift row doesn’t appear on its own, and the panel says so. Add the [tendlio_free_gift] shortcode to your cart page where you want it. If you put the shortcode on an ordinary page, exclude that page from your page cache, the same way your cart and checkout pages are. A cached copy shows one shopper’s offer to the next shopper.
Switch the gift off #
Turn off Show the “claim your free gift” slider on the cart, or turn off Experimental features in Settings. The offer disappears from your store. A gift a shopper already claimed stays free through checkout, so nobody is charged for it.
See what the gift did #
Once the first order with a gift comes in, the panel shows What the gift has done, for the last 90 days: how many orders went out with a gift, and what those orders were worth. Once there are enough orders both with and without a gift, it also compares the average basket with a gift to the average without one. And it estimates what replacing the gifts would cost you, at the cost prices from your last analysis.
Read the comparison with care. The gift only appears once a cart reaches your minimum, so every basket with a gift had already reached it. Part of the difference between the two averages comes from that alone. That’s why the panel shows both averages and doesn’t call the difference earnings.
Why the page and the gift work this way #
Outlet discounts skip the minimum #
Auto outlet starts with small discounts: its first step is 10% unless you’ve changed it, below the Deals page’s starting minimum of 20%. If the minimum applied to Outlet too, a product in its first step would stay off the page that exists for discounted stock.
Sold-out products never appear on the Deals page #
The page is there to sell what’s on sale now, so it lists only products that are in stock. The Show sold-out products in the rows switch on the Storefront page doesn’t change that.
A minimum of 0 offers no gift #
Tendlio offers nothing until you set a minimum. Without one, every cart would qualify, even an empty one.
Additional resources #
- How to set up Auto outlet to clear your dead stock: the discounts that fill the Deals page.
- How to discount products yourself with Manual outlet: the lists the gift suggestions come from.
- How to use the Tendlio fields on a product: the Offer as a free gift checkbox.
- Measuring what the widgets earn: what the Deals page brings in.
Frequently asked questions #
Do I have to update the Deals page when a sale ends? #
No. The page reads your current sale prices, so a product drops off when its sale ends or it sells out.
Why is a product on sale missing from the Deals page? #
Its discount is under your minimum (and Outlet isn't the one discounting it), it's out of stock or on backorder, it's hidden from your catalog or from recommendations, it's in an excluded category, or more than 1,000 products are on sale and it isn't among the best sellers the page keeps.
Can a shopper claim two gifts? #
No. The row disappears once a gift is in the cart, and the gift stays at one unit.
What happens to a claimed gift if I switch the offer off? #
It stays free through checkout.